Babes in tomorrowland: Walt Disney and the making of the American child, 1930-1960 9780822334637, 9780822334514

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, BABES IN TOMORROWLAND

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~ Couneil of Green Bay, Wisconsin, | Sy yen ey he A Sees MBs oS: wei [the visual eduration program of =

need not worry the motion Caitqmah York4,500 City public schools on — oe - pleture tastes of theabout younger) (S@i| |aaa eo, eeOly oorMMSE, i. May (New 10 when sehool children —

| ths Franklin Sunies Meare Manhatten and from the Bronx Biot elie aie gnaHigh pen Srieeeeeee, ee Ce,from «= 8 & che-reel cutting Sooky — —

«School, who participated in a eur-| 1) Cols Sie «une an eee OE wae «=f and aiterwards debaied whether —

vey conducted by the Council, be] E| aa a nee OSee Beat Skippy should have told his fatherthe _ frayed & healthy scorn of were “sey” 7 ~~ me«|«= before he charged groceries Gangster pictures also) | ; f.flatter's gecoune in anfrom endeavor to _fleas. ea_their taboo. or near taboo Hstey -~ 1 2 ae [eave Sooky’'s family the poor-

Otherwise the pupils’ film pref-| E@ oH eo é fue

_- Seventh andwesterns, eighth graders hedand s/ OPM | | ee «== wrinkled withtried concentration diking for: mysteries a to ree ae ee ee ee «ssheads the boys and girls to dgure comedy.matority| Ninth graders,| | se Migs SMa te Secagee [out for themselves whether it was in Dr. «having “slapstick achieved greater [RESO aa) CONS Mine oee RE wrong for Skippy to march “of viewpoint, were enthusiastic) [oT Staggers y Pon Wipers 4 Re NSN GgieRs | Saunders’ pre-election parade when __ about musical comedy, historical | Mss - GREE RY ~~ eM eee me [his father was x rival candidate = TED placed suaphanis ngon:soclal aeceeeeeage oe pra es and eeewhether gow Shick placed emphasis apon cane,eee soe Berar Ne ame =Sicinner intoee theped Boone vale. ce wharves | Resocial’ MS, Egle” ae, Tee «Dr, wasBoys, fo blame for his

ride te toe ie epciac tins| PR ee Oe eS eS BE [vrs reluctance t» confide in him.

were Bright Eyes and Little) (Ya NRE lite chee ne toro

Colonel, both starring Shitley | SSE een tories of dims prepared under tht _ ple, Little Women, with Tem= Katharine} = A| aGivsetion of the Committee onoe Sac Fs ontinased | Oh> Center: Sama focrame, Vheceman co SARTRE SREtoc OBE efBaga). os feted by MGM Lowa Pe 8. Mayers right; | PIBD TERME OD SB BRST Matios & NCR OF Pisrare Berea EP A a es

a I Bahan Taki ECan of Loe Angeles i ere ee ,

Managers Help “Ten uulllion children can't be Looram, gram, Chairman of the” Motion; . (ES RENEYouth oo egnead by pletures if the srasent |Pleture Buvean af the International | an “o Make= to College Handerd of taotion picture produc: |Foderation of ‘Catholio Alunuwe Blan Te ) Make © | Bon is kept uy rape sak ee | es she returned from a trip to} == Peace Films Pay _

agaSe message back from ‘the West Coast to plan fora wider} _0As result of the brought eivie-minded-| Los Angeles by Mrs. James F.| (Continued om Pace) FO

4. Even as the Motion Picture Production Code was promulgated, the Mpppa distributed = _ The Motion Picture and the Family in theater lobbies as a means of deflecting criticism that

, | the industry was insensitive to the needs of children. Like other efforts to avoid censorship, | this short-lived organ shifted responsibility from producers to consuming families.

and Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Children reported to her- listeners , _ that “each year. . . critics firid a larger proportion of the studios’ output which |

they can heartily approve. Today about one-third of all pictures produced are |

| _ approved, as the expression is, ‘for family audiences.” Still, she warned, the | - stakes were quite high: “From the movie [sic] these children, in their most. oS _ impressionable years, receive impressions which influence them deeply—im- __ pressions which will have power in moulding their whole future lives, either _ _ for good or ill. Studies made on thousands of children leave the fact of such —

influence beyondadoubt.”, , oo ,

, _. The studies to which she referred were undoubtedly those of the Payne - Fund (named for their sponsor). Comprising twelve different research pro- _ grams conducted between 1928 and 1932, these studies were the most systematic attempt to date to locate, describe, and quantify the effects of movies on

60 «= * CHAPTERONE ~~ , _

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| Ay se 5 mene, = =—s—iwaes(‘(‘(‘é*#CAMI moction: pictures are now certified by |

| aa 8 y WSARESE A = :s:=i‘(‘;:é‘ésK producers to conform too right standards Of | .

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|) eee UW BS wef 8 BAER me / | farther than this in helping you select the right. [-

| Sits “TRL SY FORT me Ssémoiee. There is'a place on the screen for all | Ae BBE Ob ly alone Uf te % forme of decent entertainment. Some pictures ft BRAT PS UP FI hag yf Snivenal toe “Mnanliy’ ‘aueealt ental che with yf.

| OD ae | CN GR designed for juveniie mst, | MAME 7 ISS yf a picture dota not indicate in itself the type | oe ae ERLE A Reh YRS ba 4g Cone of the: eals reproduced het wit! int e 4 | [Sepeeae RA, advertising. In addition, your Fox Theatreman| NNER het These Seals dP MYC ASOT WHHL Have available a monthly bulletin, |

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pono > CMRI" op vas Guidetos |)” Classifving all pictures according to the judg [

fo ee TR TN | Sk Emtertsinent 2 «ment of the Better Films Councils of six oa- | [

ot a al ected f eh ee ‘eenys |. tional women's organizations. |ABare ter, ea Furthermore, your Fox Themre menagerie | weere errr ree | CY . always happy to explain the suitability of any | a eearsincccoonn cata CS ie pens hy nd grenyzeeee *. Me a LOCH YOU the Bee ee Lea Ee Pa

| NSS ey, Ad the New Season Offers the Finest Listef | | "FSR (IIe —ié«éwWWhrokesiorme’ Mlowiess iver Prodnced, Drawe || | ggg AWERTISEMRNTT PURLISHED IN THR DeTEREST OF BETTER pioTuRES BY sis:=C

| Fox West Coast Adopts Audience Suitability Seal for Ads |

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BAG 2 ene UL _salceenione eel SRE a agg Crake sees eee | | By such devices Fred Wehrenberg, St. Louis theatre owner, coaxes the |

| eiddies to family night shows

5. Two advertisements from Motion Picture and the Family (November 1934). Top: Fox indicates its willingness to police its product and demonstrates to patrons its imbrication in a rating system that is “family friendly.” Bottom: A St. Louis exhibitor signals family friendliness by deploying Disney characters.

. 2 s . . . * ce . . 33

children. As Henry James Forman, the author of a popular summary of the studies that appeared in McCall’s Magazine in 1932, put it: “It is very hard to believe that anything very harmful lurks behind the glittering portals where Mickey Mouse cavorts, where the news reels are shown, and where handsome actors and actresses walk through romances that bring diversion and recreation to both children and adults. Let us look inside for a moment, however” (Forman 1932b). It was as if the studies promised to take the reader through the screen and into the world in which the values of producers were imprinted on : celluloid, to turn and look back at an audience of children and see, objectively, © how their attitudes and behaviors were shaped by moviegoing. After thirty-odd years of movies, the medium had gone from a local phenomenon primarily of _ social concern for its influence on the bodies and behaviors of immigrant and working-class children, to a national art form consumed uniformly by children from different class, gender, and racial positions. More than any other preceding discursive formation, discussions of the Payne Fund Studies would | cement the notion of a generic child engaged in a uniform practice of viewing and deriving effects from that practice applicable to any other child, regardless

of race, class, or gender.

The Payne Fund Studies a | Do the pictures really influence children . . . ? Are their conduct, ideals,

and attitudes affected by the movies ... ? [T]he investigators who | cooperated to make this [Payne Fund] series of studies... set up | a individual studies to ascertain the answer to the questions and to provide a composite answer to the central question of the nature and the extent of these influences. .. . Parents, educators, and physicians will have little difficulty in fitting concrete details of their own into the outlines which

these studies supply. a , —W. W. CHARTERS, IN DALE 1935, V-V1_ , - | :

So begins the preface to The Content of Motion Pictures, one of the Payne _ Fund studies, couching alarmist questions in a tone of reassuring scientism. The studies were highly controversial within the movie industry, among procensorship groups, and even within the social scientific community that produced them. Many of the studies were contested—by both social scientists and the motion-picture industry — as poor science that relied upon hearsay, opinion, poor sampling methods, and an insufficient regard for history and culture.?! As has been the case with virtually every subsequent study on media

62 * CHAPTER ONE | |

effects, they were ultimately deemed inconclusive. Yet the construction of the studies and subsequent debate about them marks the intersection of discourses about the nature of childhood and of movie effects at a time when Hollywood studios —including Disney — were consolidating their position as the purveyors of a truly national medium. Even though the studies were inconclusive,

they produced a great deal of heat and light about the effects of movies on children, influenced the activities of the Hays Office and groups pressing for reform—such as the Catholic Legion of Decency and the Federal Council of Churches— and added significantly to a growing range of discourses that imagined a normal American child involved in a life of increasingly standardized practices. The result of a complex of institutional and political forces, the studies were meant to serve a variety of purposes. For some participants, they

were to prove that movies could harm children and should be more strictly regulated. For others, the research was an honest intellectual enterprise to determine whether movies did affect children. For others, they were meant to put pressure on the industry to stop practices such as block booking that forced exhibitors to show substandard fare (Jowett, Jarvie, and Fuller 1996). Whatever

the motivation of individual actors in the studies, however, they seemed to promise to a concerned public concrete information about whether and how movies shaped children. The studies ran the gamut of social-science techniques, from the tabulation of audience attendance patterns, to questionnaires, interviews, autobiography, and galvanic-response testing. Although each of the studies but one was released as an independent volume, a popular overview of the series was written by Forman and published first as a series of articles in McCall’s Magazine in 1932 and later as the book Our Movie Made Children (Forman 1932a, 1932b, 1932C¢, 1934). Although the individual studies attempted to present their findings in an even-handed manner, Forman’s popular summaries (much to the dismay of some individual researchers) were heavily biased toward the assumption that the movies in the late 1920s and early 1930s had a profoundly negative effect on children.*” In “Movie Madness” (Forman 1932b), the second installment in the McCall’s series, Forman informed his audience that in 1929, “almost 23,000,000 minors were weekly movie fans and nearly 12,000,000 were fourteen years old or younger. ... more than 6,000,000 were seven years old or less” (15). Accusing MpPDa president Will Hays of grossly underestimating children’s movie attendance, Forman warned that “over 6,000,000 young children, according to the Payne Fund statistics, go to matineé [sic] performances weekly. They spend from two to four hours doing nothing except absorb the shadows which flit before them and the dialogue which comes forth from the sound apparatus. DISNEY MAKES DISNEY *_ 63

-i.aan a Ce ee | toned -— 7. —— | a

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If hard times last much longer and nothing is done for these boys, things

wil be pretty bad for them. They won't get an education. They'll form the habit of getting by without working. They'll get used to going for days without taking their clothes off, and they'll learn stealing and vice from

the old bums that are always on the road. Take it from me, an awful lot of young people in America are growing up to be criminals. — —K. DAVIS 1935, 6

Some five years before Walt Disney would release Pinocchio (1940), the University of Chicago Press, under the auspices of the New Deal, put out Youth in the Depression (K. Davis 1935), an account of the effect of the country’s economic crisis on its young people. In words that echoed the plot of Pinocchio, a railroad policeman described to the author a generation of criminals and vagabonds in the making. Cut loose from their familial and social moorings, with little reason to attend school, these boys were changing from a precious national resource to a national burden. By this account, by 1933 “one out of every twenty young men in the United States was wandering aimlessly around the country. .. . Just as many young men, and probably more, were at home, idle. They needed only a little more want and suffering to push them, too, out on the road” (K. Davis 1935, 7-8). Like grim versions of Pinocchio, these teenage boys were setting out on the road to become real, and like the animated character, they would form their reality based on the influences they encountered

, along the way. _ While the Great Depression profoundly informed the anxieties of parents concerned for the future of their children, and of a society worried about youth

in general, the terms used to voice these concerns were shaped well before the 1930s. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, progressive social reformers such as Jane Addams, Florence Kelley, or Jacob Riis fought to improve the

lives of the urban poor, many of whom were recent European immigrants.’ Much of this struggle involved immediate efforts to ease the effects of crushing poverty — such as the reform of housing laws and rehabilitation of tenements,

or the improvement of working conditions and hours. But the language reformers used to make their case to the public often invoked the rhetoric and images of child-saving and assimilation: the idea that the working poor and immigrants could best improve their lives by internalizing the values and behav-

iors of that same middle class to which reformers spoke. Since children were pliable and adaptable, they were the key to that enterprise. As progressive-era social reformers appealed for support, they invoked an ideal childhood into which poor children would assimilate, one which was being produced in the emerging fields that comprised child development.’ This child, modeled on _ the bodies and behaviors of the white, middle-class children ofresearchersand

_ the communities they served, was a benchmark against which middle-class parents were to gauge their own children’s progress, and toward which social | reformers could direct their efforts to improve the material and social lives _ of the poor (Cravens 1985). In the discourses of both development and uplift, this generic child —a complex of specific behaviors and bodily norms —wasan

endpoint, a fulcrum in the ordering of relations between culture and society. ~What had changed between the turn of the century and the 1930s was that children in need of protection and uplift were no longer simply those of the poor; they were increasingly referred to generically, as “children” or “youth.” As a depression-era ad placed by Encyclopedia Britannica in Child Life and Parents’ : Magazine put it to middle-class parents, “Are you preparing your children for FAME or FAILURE? The average child in the fifth grade, according to govern- , ment statistics, has only one chance in 50 to complete a college education — one chance in 50, really, to avoid failure.”’ (See figure 8.) "If this ideal child isolated through empirical research comprised a set of

physical and behavioral norms, though, the children gauged against it were anything but abstract: in public discourse about the well-being of children, they

were understood as members of a new mass consumer culture. These were the children affected by the movies in the Payne Fund studies, as well as by , books, toys, and other articles they consumed, who, as they entered the hurly- — burly of daily mass culture, might well deviate from the parameters set by the ideal child. This normal child, on the other hand, was the result of decades of

research and data correlation, the aggregate of thousands of measurements | and observations of weight, height, posture, smiling, laughing, speaking, eat-_ ing, defecating, aggression, cooperation, understanding, misunderstanding, etc. Whether applied to middle-class children whose parents (i.e., mothers)

82 * CHAPTERTWO |

Oe ee ee ee ee eee ee cue Sea i aye “3 5 acco

Pe ee ee eh| Bataan se AeLia Ae ee rr—, acing a father and_a mother from ber. Buy it at the better class news, | .philosophy for family suicide is to correct ourthe the pubic couponvenienee, printed below for cc your com; 7 _ | ee of success. When cc cc rrr‘ | : ss among the children. The right remedy stands or send in your subscription on ,

“Slow Suicide Among Our Na- The Mexiean Renaissance, = = = The Age of Experiment, 7 tive Stock, Tg pm Grucning, ===the by The Henry Seidel Canby | oe 2 by Professor EA. Rows. —buIxErnest America Fit to Join Kitten and the Master- | - ‘Wnele Sam end the Statue of League? by Francie Hackett. _—_piece, a story, by Floyd Delle

oo Uo iberty,ole Phe Wondering =-=—“(iws Margaretae Blake, a story, , vie vpn RelokJew, Barton Pergo eee ti -

eee ee yet ow £ UT AAA ~ A OOrREaIVe lle THE CENTURY COMPANY, 383 Fourth Avenue, New York City

Oo or the $5 enclosed, please send the Century for one year to

Oo _ 10. An advertisement for the Christian Century Magazine (February 1924) citing ,

| University of Wisconsin sociologist Edward Ross’s warning to ostensibly white os - or “native” Americans that their falling reproductive rates were tantamountto oo _. “race suicide.” Not only was this rhetoric meant to encourage reproduction, it | | _. also fed arguments for contraception as a eugenic practice by reformers such __ _ as Margaret Sanger and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Ayers Collection, Archives =>

Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institutions ==

purging the nascent field of anthropology of excesses in racialism and pseudoevolutionary thinking by stressing the distinction between the biological and the cultural (Stocking 1968). Although Boas would continue to refine his position over the coming years, the project of replacing the racial hierarchies of hard-line eugenicists apparently required a moderate position in which a quasiDarwinian notion of uplift made permeable supposedly inviolable barriers of heredity. Indeed, the term progressive was (and is) so vague as to admit a variety of positions, even in individuals. For example, Charlotte Perkins Gilman could frame a quite earnest and modern call for the improvement of the living conditions of the poor, immigrant family in outwardly racist terms:

The nearer we are to the animals, the more capable and bright the very little ones. In the South it was common to set a little black child to take care of an older white one: the pickaninny matures much more rapidly. So, again, in our own lower social grades the little children of the poor are sharper, better able to care for themselves, than children of the same age in more developed classes. It is no proof of greater intelligence in the adult. It is retrogression, —a mark of bad social conditions. (Gilman 1900, 294)

In the mind of this sincere progressive reformer, the contradiction between the racism of one sentiment and the social radicalism of the other disappeared into the body of the immigrant child. Children of other races were evolutionarily previous to their white peers, but only temporarily so. The doctrine of uplift allowed for the advancement of the backward races through cultural and social enlightenment while maintaining the immediate reinforcement of racial difference by forestalling evolutionary parity (if only slightly) to an indeterminate future that was meant to become determinate with further research. Thus Boas’s position in 1911 seems a significant improvement over that of Charles Ellwood (who would eventually become president of the American Sociological Society) in 1901 that “natural selection” separated the races by heredity, and that this selection could be only attenuated, not wholly erased:*°

The negro child, even when reared in a white family under the most favorable condition, fails to take on the mental and moral characteristics of the

Caucasian race. His mental attitudes toward persons and things, toward organized society, toward life, and toward religion never become quite the same as those of the white. His natural instincts, it is true, may be modified by training, and perhaps indefinitely in the course of generations; but the race habit of a thousand generations or more is not lightly set aside by

MAKING AMANAGEABLE CHILD * 93

in Stocking 1968) oe

the voluntary or enforced imitation of visible models. (Ellwood, quoted

Although by the 1920s the American social sciences would, in the course of disciplinary formation, largely purge themselves of such excess, the public progressive project of uplift during the first two decades of the twentieth century espoused a view of the world in which heredity and environment both played

_ arole in shaping people, but within which only the environment could (and | should) be altered (Hall 1965).!” And while adult immigrants could be trained in American ways of living — through adult education and home visits by social workers —their children could actually be made into full-fledged Americans if they had the proper social and cultural exposure. If the nation were to survive

| and prosper, it would be because the children of Poles and Italians, of Romanians and Russians— and the working-class “American” children growing up alongside them — were being raised in an “American” environment engineered

to speed the process of assimilation. - , That engineering was not limited to regulating child-rearing practices, however, and many other social policies instigated and promulgated by progressive reformers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are taken as givens today. Viviana Zelizer (1985) reports that although efforts to enact

, federal bans and constitutional amendments outlawing child labor failed re- , peatedly well into the 1920s, the number of children in heavy industry declined . during the period nonetheless. Ironically, the influx of cheap immigrant labor _and several agricultural depressions made the work of state societies for the prevention of cruelty to children (and animals) easier, and as reformers lobbied 7 at the state and local level, heavy industries began to curtail their use of child labor (see United States Department of Labor, Children’s Bureau 1930). Increasingly, the only jobs thought acceptable for children were in agriculture, domestic work, and in services such as newspaper delivery. (Roediger 1991 points out that the lack of reform in these industries meant that working con- ,

, largely unchanged.) ,

, ditions for black, Asian, and Latino children—and many adults—remained ,

Even if progressive-era social reformers were unable to pass a comprehensive ban on child labor, however, progressive efforts for social uplift by regulat- , , ing the life of the child succeeded in generating limited federal action. In 1909, the first in a series of White House conferences on children that would continue into the 1960s convened, and by 1912 a federal Children’s Bureau had been

established within the Department of Labor. Two members of Jane Addams’s _ Hull House, Julia Lathrop and Grace Abbott, would serve as directors of the

94 * CHAPTER TWO ,

bureau, and under Abbott in particular it would expand its ambit from an initial focus on the living conditions of poor rural and urban mothers, to advocacy for a more generalized child study that benefited all children, regardless of class, race, or ethnicity.”° As the century progressed, the confluence of these various social and economic changes created a condition in which children were perceived as occupying a social sphere increasingly different than that of adults. Hamilton Cravens (1985) suggests that from the 1890s onward, children increasingly constituted a social group different from adults, and Zelizer (1985) argues that the gradual removal of children from the labor market forced a reconsideration of their value to parents and to society in which the labor value of children was converted to “preciousness,” and childhood became a “sacralized” time prior to the harsh realities of adult economic life.”° Thus, efforts to protect the children of the poor, and to convert their values and behaviors to those of their betters, discursively positioned those children as culturally and socially distinct from their parents, operating in the liminal and malleable sphere of childhood that they shared with children of the middle class. This convergence had the effect of facilitating the application of discourses of protection to middle-class children, and of extending developmental parameters to poor children — provided that they were raised in the proper environment.

The emergence of this sacred child set the preconditions for a mass children’s } market by imagining the child as having psychic and material needs entirely different than those of adults, and as being susceptible to the environmental influences of culture, whether “American” or mass-produced. For progressive social reformers, the idea of a distinct child’s environment would focus efforts

to define both the proper nature of that environment and the development of the child within it. To do this work, however, progressive-era social workers required a methodology that delivered to the child the necessary attitudes and behaviors, as well as a set of guidelines for gauging that child’s progress. As Geraldine Youcha put it (1995, 133-135), settlement houses such as Hull House imagined themselves as a form of “scienific charity” in which middle-class norms were extended to immigrants and the working-class through “scientific child-rearing principles.” As a condition of the social location of most social scientists at

the turn of the century, the scientific principles that reformers such as Jane Addams, Florence Kelly, or Grace Abbott deployed in these operations were derived from data gathered and collated by amateurs and professionals in childstudy societies made up of people from middle- and upper-class backgrounds

such as their own, studying the behaviors and habits of their own children,

MAKING AMANAGEABLE CHILD + 95

often within their own homes. Beginning in the last decade or so of the nineteenth century, these societies, anda growing number of professional research- , ers, collected and collated an impressive array of data on child development that purported to apprehend the child in its natural state, but which (even in early laboratory work) assumed that the conditions obtaining in middle-class

- households (or in the behaviors of middle-class laboratory workers) were so appropriate to “the race” that the middle-class child appeared to be operating in a natural environment, and the data collected from its observation was

culturally untainted. Thus, the scientific language that progressive reformers _ used to describe a generic childhood emerged not only from the pens of early _ developmental researchers such as G. Stanley Hall or Arnold Gesell, but initially from their collaborators in amateur child-study associations And in that collaboration we find the naturalization of the middle-class home and child

that would form the basis for the generic child and environment that Disney

would target in the coming decades. |

From Child Study to the Study of Childhood oo a In the letters column 1893 annual Childhood magazine, an organ of the Parents’ Association of America, association member B. O. Flower argued that [Parents] are the moulders ofa new civilization, and as such, it is all impor-

a tant that the grave responsibilities devolving upon parenthood be brought , home to the conscience of every enlightened man and woman. ... There —

followed: | , a _ I. Hereditary. | , , are three lines of investigation or research which . . . should be carefully

II. Pre-natal Influence. _ , |

TIL. Influences of Early Environment. ... oe

The quickest way to accomplish great reforms is... through the presen- _ tation of carefully arranged data resting upon authenticated facts. . . . [and , through such reforms] we will have such a marked change in the children

255) | BO

coming into the civilized homes that an entirely new era will ensue. (254-

, The concerns of members such as Flower, in an organization so firmly rooted =—_ in the upper and middle classes that many of its members apologized for miss-

, | ing its summer meeting because they were on the Continent, were with the development of a scientific program for the study and improvement of their own children—and by extension, all children. The rhetoric employed here dif-

96 * CHAPTER TWO _ | | |

fered from that of progressive reformers on several counts. First, it assumed an educated and concerned parent with sufficient leisure time to collect and collate data, as well as the financial wherewithal to adjust her living conditions to best suit the prepartum “child” and infant in its “environment.” Next, it linked individual parents (rather than the state, or social reformers) with the future of “civilization, the natural assumption being that in the proper dyadic or triadic

relationship between parent and child, the particulars of culture were most effectively transmitted from one generation to the next. Finally, in contrast to the Galtonian excesses of extreme eugenicists and nativists, it sought to lend equal weight to heredity, environment, and prenatal conditions, backhandedly offering a program that promised some uplift (by way of proper prenatal care and early environment), but which hewed to a milder eugenicist position in which, no matter what advantages obtained, heredity could limit the ultimate effect of uplift.” As it is difficult to locate in the term progressive a single, coherent political or social philosophy, it is equally difficult to ascribe to the proponents of child study in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries a unified theoretical or methodological base. Early child study was a cottage industry, a loose fellowship that comprised matrons, mothers, college students, doctors, and psychologists (G. Stanley Hall was ostensibly a member of the Parents’ As-

sociation of America). This fellowship shared the common goal of obtaining useful data on the behavior and development of infants and children. And although the methodological discussions carried on by the likes of William James, Wilhelm Wundt, John Dewey, or Hall himself may have filtered down | to amateur members, as a whole the movement, like many scientific enterprises in their infancy, did not until the late teens or early twenties develop clear disciplinary boundaries or apparatuses for the discursive policing of its adherents.** What members shared, were they professional or amateur (if indeed one can clearly make that distinction in the absence of a clearly formed profession), was a belief in a broad concept of “progress” based loosely on a Darwinism that, at its most optimistic, was often shaded with Lamarckian overtones, and at its most pessimistic assumed that members of immigrant and working-class groups, should they multiply, might well pollute an imagined American race with genetic weaknesses such as idiocy, alcoholism, and sexual deviation.”* This basic belief that some form of Darwinism operated in both the production and correction of long-term social problems bound a wide range of amateur and professional researchers in child development. Far from fatalistic, this shared approach assumed that knowledge of evolutionary theory compelled the researcher and the reformer alike to strive toward the MAKING AMANAGEABLE CHILD * 97

betterment of the race as one’s personal contribution to the regulation of the.

process of a nonetheless inevitable natural selection. , As has been noted elsewhere, the Darwinian bent of child-study adherents _ crossed over into Lamarckism for those who assumed that changes in culture translated into changes in biology, and that the regulation of culture through

environment was the most effective way to direct the process of selection.4*

, Thus, an author writing on character development in Childhood began her | article with a brief description of evolution as a biological process, stressing nature’s inexorable urge to move from the primitive to the advanced: “From the beginning, all history of nature, from the story of a coral reef to the tragedy of humanity, has been a record of development. There has always been progress from less to greater, with many lapses, it is true, with many missing links in the sequence, but, looked at from age to age, the movement has been onward”

(J. Smith 1893, 347). , a

Citing basic work conducted on cats, in which feline motor and reflex centers were successfully isolated, the author then blended those results with

phrenology to suggest that if “the brain can be mapped out, and if, as seems not impossible, science can, by careful investigation and experiment, say in which ganglia love sits enthroned, where reverence, where hate, may it not be that, knowing the possibilities of a given organization and the hereditary traits, one can abort evil and cultivate the good?” (J. Smith 1893, 350). Even if it weren't |

possible to surgically suppress and encourage sentiments and behaviors, the author suggested, the research of the day promised that it might well be possible to regulate the child’s environment to the point that the same effect was achieved, causing noble qualities to flourish through exercise and baser ones to atrophy until they simply weren’t strong enough to express themselves in| - subsequent generations. Confronted with the inexorable nature of evolution,

| Smith asked her readers, “Where, then, is our refuge from .. . fatalism?” (351) , In reply she quoted a contemporary evolutionary theorist (Théodule Ribot),.

| __-who suggested, “Evolution produces physiological and psychological modifications. Habit fixes these in the individual. Heredity fixes them in the race” (Smith 1893, 352). Through a tidy sleight of hand, evolution’s programmatic imperative was turned from a handicap to an advantage: even as the child expressed both negative and positive evolutionary changes, proper regulation of — its habits would allow for the selection of beneficial qualities for transmission to future generations and the suppression of the detrimental. Much as the introduction of electricity to the domestic environment in the

oe turn-of-the-century United States encouraged flights of fancy such as galvanic | belts, rectal thermeators, and low-voltage baths—devices which would mi-

98 * CHAPTERTWO > a ,

raculously cure ailments both physiological and psychological — enthusiasm for a universal Darwinism led to a few such excesses in the emerging field of child study. Yet at the same time, efforts to catalogue the child’s basic range of developmental and behavioral markers, as well as its relationship to its environment, also resulted in the assembly of impressive amounts of data on child development, and in the formation of broad disciplinary boundaries. Beginning in roughly the 1880s and extending well into the next century, psychologists, sociologists, and philosophers such as Dewey, James, Thorndike, and Hall (to name but a few) traced the outlines of a discipline that would first be called Child Study and would eventually form a broad umbrella of developmental studies that would include specialties in psychology, pediatrics, the domestic

economy, and education.” , ,

During this formative period, relations between parent and child, between child and environment, and between child and researcher were the topic of some debate. Some researchers insisted that mothers be separated from their children during research because they would exert undue emotional influence on the child, corrupting observational data; others argued the opposite, claiming that only the mother, given her close natural bond with the child, could properly interpret its gestures, movements, and cries (Sully 1902, 21-52; G. Hall 1965). The ideal researcher (for some) would be a mother who was also a trained research scientist. This appeared to be the case with Kathleen Carter Moore, whose monograph “The Mental Development of a Child” (1896) ap, peared in The Psychological Review, a professional journal that listed Alfred

Binet, John Dewey, William James, Hugo Munsterberg, and other leading so- | cial scientists on its board.”° Deploying a highly articulated and rigorous obser-

vational apparatus that differentiated child-rearing activities from the conditions under which they occurred, and changes in behavior from the conditions under which they were observed to occur, Moore studied her own child from birth, recording reams of data on his physical, mental, emotional, and sensory development (see figure 11).

To guarantee the reliability of her data, and in conformity with contemporary thought on observational technique, Moore established a relationship between herself and her child/subject that encapsulated arguments about the mother’s influence on the child (as mother, or as researcher) and about the

child’s relationship to its environment: : The course of my child’s development has, I believe, been a normal one. He suffered little from interference, and was never stimulated to premature action. He was accustomed to playing alone. Especial care was taken

MAKING AMANAGEABLE CHILD ¥* 99

2 aot De |

(say sentences containing 384 words. ag sentences containing sro words:

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Il. Tabulation of Katherine Carter Moore’s systematic observation of her son’s development in the October 1896 issue of Psychological Review (whose contributing editors included

- Alfred Binet, John Dewey, and William James). Moore’s research was conducted in the © home rather than the laboratory, and her maternal position ostensibly made hera more environmentally appropriate observer than a man.

not to teach him the tricks which are commonly taught to babies. ... When it was necessary that he should be taught habits essential to his welfare, no pains were spared. Regular hours of feeding, sleeping, etc., were main-

1896, 3-4) oo '

tained. Good health and rapid growth have uniformly been his. (Moore _ This representation of the child’s early life suggests a complex ontological schema in which the child was treated as a natural creature subjected to the

minimum of “interference” in order to obtain the purest observational data , possible. The idea that it not be “stimulated to premature action” suggestsfurthera regular timetable for the expression of certain abilities and a scientific detachment related to their elicitation. Where the child by (almost unfortunate) necessity had to be enculturated, that process was regulated, as were its eating

and sleeping patterns, in an effort to maximize useful observational databefore uncontrolled variables became too prevalent. Far from the victim of abuse

or neglect, the child raised in isolation was considered the perfect test subject, and the fortunate beneficiary of the latest in regulated, scientific guidance in its | | development.” Thus, although the child was isolated from contact with other children (and presumably other adults) and unregulated contact, play, feeding, © and so on were strictly avoided, Moore described his development as “nor-

100 * CHAPTER TWO | a

mal.” The meaning of “normal” implied in this work meant “standardized” —

the child’s upbringing was regulated to the point that abnormal or irregular _ influences were minimized, its environment carefully monitored, its bodily functions entrained within a set schedule. This did not mean, however, that the term normal bore no relation to later usages: the data generated in experiments such as this would become the foundation for setting the acceptable parameters for the physical, mental, and behavioral development of average American children in generations to come. The use of normalized conditions to raise the turn-of-the-century white, middle-class child within optimal parameters thus also generated data through which conditions that today might be called cultural were incorporated into a natural environment that in turn naturalized a set of developmental and behavioral curves as inherent to any child.” , Understood in this fashion, the child has been, at least since the turn of the century, a fantastic object, a device that translated social and material relations into natural phenomena, and that converted natural stimuli back into social relations when it became an adult.?® This idea of the child was not, however,

simply the byproduct of neo-Darwinian faddism. The child formed a strange exception, a site where the time frame of natural selection violated an ever more widely accepted schema that understood evolutionary change as happening over many successive generations, rather than within a single generation. What made this exception possible was the widely held belief that “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” (that the development of the individual child encapsulates the evolution of the entire species). While in its strictest sense this little commonplace was meant to refer only to the fetus in utero, its meaning soon expanded to include the social and cultural development of the infant and child. If the fetus recapitulated the prehistory of the species— from invertebrate, to fish, to amphibian, and so forth — then the developing infant and child recapitulated the march of human civilization, from the primitive to the modern. This child-as-homunculus, then, provided an exceptional window into a maddeningly slow evolutionary process, a fulcrum against which to apply pressure in efforts to direct the seemingly natural evolution of American social and cultural life. As John B. Watson suggested in an article for the educated, middleclass readers of Harper’s Magazine, it seemed possible to shape the future in the crucible of the laboratory (domestic or otherwise), by treating children as experimental animals whose natural instincts could be scientifically separated from cultural influences: The students of experimental evolution . .. becoming more and more dissatisfied with the Darwinian conception of instinct — calling as it does for

MAKING AMANAGEABLE CHILD ¥* [01 _

a belief in “fitness” or “adaptiveness” of all forms of instinctive action—are

asking the comparative psychologists to re-examine the forms of animal | activity in the light of recent data which have been gathered by experi-

mentally controlling the process of evolution—data which I may sayin passing are revolutionizing our present theory of evolution. Both to bring the work in animal behavior in line with these newer facts on evolution, and to assist the child psychologist in his problems, we need to have more exact knowledge of the different types of “native” or “untutored” activity

in child and animal. (Watson 1912, 376) 7 oe While progressive-era social reformers would adopt this reasoning to argue _ for programs of uplift for the poor and working classes, the audience for those —

arguments were familiar with them through calls to shape their own children’s a environments to regulate their development and, by extension, the evolution.

of American culture.*° , Oo |

To properly produce that environment for their own children, the pro- | gressive middle class had access to an array of increasingly scientific child- _ rearing manuals, the most popular of which was pediatrician Luther Emmett __ - Holt’s The Care and Feeding of Children (1894), which employed the question-

and-answer form that Benjamin Spock would adopt some fifty yearslater,and which encouraged rigor in the regulation of the child’s eating, sleeping, and | even crying: “How many [bowel] movements daily should an infant have during the , first few weeks of life? .. . Usually three of foura day for the first week, and then two or three each day... . How much crying is normal for a very young baby? . . .

From fifteen to thirty minutes a day” (Holt 1894, 49-52). ae Texts such as Holt’s assumed, of course, that the child would have sufficient food to fuel three or four bowel movements a day, and to satisfy needs it ex-

pressed through crying. They also assumed a literate public with leisure time | sufficient not only for reading, but for developing and maintaining a regime of observation that would permit proper control of the child’s environment. For poor families, literacy and leisure time were hardly guaranteed, nor were

sufficient quantities of food or the relative isolation of the child’s environment , of which Moore had spoken. The Care and Feeding of Children also marked a trend that would only become more pronounced as the twentieth century progressed: the emergence of child-rearing literature for a popular audience written by experts in child development. For while members of the hybrid domes- _ tic/clinical child-study associations of the late nineteenth and early twentieth

centuries may have framed their discourse in a Darwinian rhetoric of the ad- | vancement of the species, their immediate means of accomplishing that goal

102 * CHAPTER TWO ee |

was the actual raising of children, and this required the translation of theoretical discussions into practical advice. By the mid-1910s, psychologists such as G. Stanley Hall at Clarke University and Arnold Gesell at Yale, operating from the progressive premise that the environment was at least as significant as heredity in shaping children, had __ established clinics and were conducting research into how best to produce a normal child.** By the 1920s, a network of research facilities devoted to what was increasingly referred to as “child training” or “child management” had developed between such diverse research institutions as Yale; Columbia; the University of lowa; Ohio State University; the University of California, Berkeley; and the University of Minnesota. Although the theoretical orientations and methods of individual labs varied, from Adler’s Child Guidance, to Gesell’s Child Development, to John B. Watson’s behaviorism, all shared the common goals of isolating the characteristics of the normal child and of creating child-

rearing programs that deployed that data in helping the child to develop to its fullest potential. And all were committed to using the latest observational technologies — particularly new methods of sequential photography and extended longitudinal and latitudinal studies—to isolate and analyze their subjects. Echoing the theory of recapitulation in an argument for detailed serial observation of development, Gesell stated, even as late as 1930:

Inasmuch as behavior can be seen, described, and photographed, we are justified in saying that mental growth can be formulated and in a sense measured. The growth of the mind, scientifically conceived, is essentially the development of a sequence of behavior values which are correlated with the maturation of the nervous system. The structural problems of developmental psychology are not unlike those of embryology; a serial

cross sectioning of the stream of behavior leads to an understanding of its . genetic relations and its laws of emergence. (138-39)

Although this emerging network of experts would continue to invoke the language of evolution in professional discourse, it is more significant in this instance that experts also used it in their popular address. Although the United States had a tradition of moral instruction to parents dating back to its earliest days (Wishy 1968), the move to regulate the home and family through distinctly

scientific principles was very much a phenomenon of the twentieth century, and the role of regulating national culture through evolutionary advancement (and vice versa) was central to that change. By the 1920s, the research laboratory would supplant the home as the site for gathering empirical data on the nature of childhood, and the middle-class home would become the primary MAKING AMANAGEABLE CHILD * _ 103

location for the application and verification of that data. If settlement houses

had been places for conducting large-scale experiments in social engineering, , the middle-class home became the site for testing and applying empirical data at a microsocial level, and parents became research assistants in that process.

, Between the Professional and the Popular | , : The most far-reaching influence that the progressives had upon the _ development of scientific management was their bringing the notions of — democracy [sic] that prevailed in the progressive era to bear upon the —

_ doctrines of Taylorism. . . . Taylorism, in turn, had a significant influence — , upon progressive thought. It had carried the ethics of professionalism, so

| _ appealing to the middle class of the progressive era, into the heartland

, of “commercialism.” | }

—HABER 1964, 166-67 ,

Ideally, what would permit parents to properly order the domestic environ- _ ment, and their children’s behaviors and consumption, was a clearly defined set of norms against which to evaluate the child’s development, and well-defined regimes with which to “manage” that development. A network of professional research facilities in the United States and abroad emerged during the 1910s and 19208 to supply those normative standards. In Vienna, Charlotte Buhler | studied children’s behavior through a glass wall; at Yale, Arnold Gesell re-

corded children on film; at Columbia Teacher’s College, Ruth Andrus deployed , squads of graduate students to observe children in kindergartens and nursery _ schools to produce an “inventory” of behaviors against which parents could , compare their children’s development (Beekman 1977, Andrus 1928). While it is not surprising that investigators in an increasingly well-established discipline

| (or group of disciplines) used similar research techniques, what was significant about the work of many child-rearing experts of the period is the degree to which they celebrated those techniques in popular versions of their published _ findings. Andrus published a voluminous compilation of charts and graphs

along with her inventory, and Gesell not only printed photos from the Yale } Psycho-Clinic, he even published the floor plan of the clinic in The Guidance of , _ Mental Growth in Infant and Child (1930), and it was common in popular childrearing books of the 1920s and 1930s to offer a wide array of tabulated data to the parent against which (one may suppose) they would rank their child. , Just as the data were important, so were the techniques by which they were derived. Child-development experts speaking to a popular audience stressed

104 ~=CHAPTERTWO , : ,

methods of isolation, observation, and transparency to validate the scientific production of data—and to naturalize techniques of detached observation begun in child-study associations in previous decades —as an integral part of a more standardized child-rearing practice. In a sense, they attempted to shift child-rearing from an artisanal or cottage industry model to one of standard clinical practice integrated into a rapidly rationalizing and nationalizing domestic economy. This discursive approach was meant to involve middle-class parents (and those aspiring to the middle class) in the scientific enterprise of disseminating norms and of regulating the development of children to conform to those

norms, the techniques of which were similar to those being deployed by scientific-management labor engineers in industry. By observing and recording workers’ motions and behaviors—in some cases using stop-action photography to break down those motions into discrete units—and subjecting that raw data to statistical analysis, industrial researchers were trying to determine and design working environments for maximum efficiency and worker comfort. Far from accidental, this rigorous empiricism played on a widespread enthusiasm for Taylorist management techniques that extended beyond the industrial world into a popular fantasy of daily life in which efficiency was linked to social order and to the regulation of the excesses of popular democracy. Indeed, efficiency and Americanism were officially linked in the Progressive party platform of 1912, in a campaign which suggested that efficiency was an inherently American quality. Scientific management also found its way into the social sciences, with some sociologists arguing over the possibility of an “objective standard of social control,” and into progressive social work, where Charles Stelzle (whose work opened this chapter) argued for the application of efficiency to church work, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman published an article on “The Waste of Private Housekeeping” in the Annals of the American Academy

of Political and Social Science (Haber 1964, 61-62, 160-62; Nelson 1980).”* Although Haber argues that by the 1920s the craze for scientific management as an expression of social control was fading (along with the progressive movement), it continued in work on domestic economy, and in child development, the discipline of which had experienced a substantial portion of its organization during efficiency’s heyday (Haber 1964, 134-38). As late as 1927, Lillian Gilbreth issued a manual for the scientific management of the home, The Home-Maker and Her Job, under the same publisher’s imprint as Douglas Thom’s Everyday Problems of the Everyday Child (Thom 1928). (See chapter 3.)°? As had been the case in previous decades, the popular presentation of different professional child-rearing techniques in books and periodicals shared the MAKING AMANAGEABLE CHILD *_— 105

idea that producing normal children remained a matter of national security

, and well-being. This notion, rooted in earlier progressive programs of assimilation for the sake of social harmony, retained in the form of behaviors the progressive virtues of self-control, deferred gratification, and hard work. Yet even as progressive theories of child-saving gave way to professional programs of child management, the idea that the health of the nation was tied to that of

its children remained, and a popular author of child-rearing manuals reminded

, his readers, “the indications are that we are just entering an era when the wel- _ , fare of the child wilt be the chief concern of the home, the community, and the , nation. Throughout the civilized world to-day, the subject . . . that is receiving the most serious attention of statesmen as well as of teachers and parents is

probably the child” (O’Shea 19209, 5). | , | Yet even as (primarily middle-class) parents were encouragedtosignupfor the national enterprise of producing normal children, they still had to choose which techniques to use. Just as F. W. Taylor had competed with Lillian and Frank Gilbreth for market share in the scientific management of industrial _

operations, so were there competing programs for how best to train children’ , in the business of childhood. From Yale University to the Iowa Research Station, each institution offered a program for the management and training of children. While there were significant differences between these models, there _ were also important similarities, and it was not uncommon to mix and match

different developmental philosophies. For example, Child Care and Training (Faegre and Anderson 1929), put out by the Institute of Child Welfare at the University of Minnesota, listed in its references for parents works by Watson,

Gesell, and Thom, each of whom favored an ostensibly different approach to _ | _ child-rearing. What the works shared, though, was a commitment to scientific , methods and a language based around the concept of management.* Books __ about children and child-rearing from the early part of the century had favored , titles such as Youth and the Race (Swift 1912) or What Grandmother Did Not Know (Fisher 1922), relied heavily upon the wisdom of their authors and upon com-

mon sense, and were often without illustrations. As the century progressed, titles such as Child Management (‘Thom 1925), Psychological Care of Infant and | Child (Watson 1928), or An Inventory of the Habits of Children from Two to Five Years of Age (Andrus 1928) became more common. The authors of these later

books replaced wisdom with credentials, common sense with research, and _ larded their pages with photographs, charts, graphs, and sample surveys for parents to use in assessing the development and behaviors of their children. And, as the central focus of public discourse about children expanded from the aberrant child produced by macrosocial conditions of class and ethnicity

| 106 * CHAPTERTWO | | } | ,

to include the normal child produced by microsocial conditions of its immediate environment, the burden of responsibility for the production of a socially useful child gradually shifted from the state or community to the individual home and parent.” Normalcy was a given beginning point for most children, and the actions of its parents determined whether the child would be able to maintain it.

Many of these institutions — especially those located at state universities, such as the Institute of Child Welfare at the University of Minnesota or the Iowa Research Station — also distributed courses in child management to parents, as did the Children’s Bureau. Although some historians of childhood consider these efforts largely unsuccessful due to a failure to achieve wide dissemination, they underestimate the overwhelming impact that this work had on ongoing popular discourses about children. By the 1920s, discussions of childhood in popular women’s magazines and in periodicals devoted to childrearing recapitulated the professional emphasis on the need for parents to construct an environment appropriate to the production of the normal child. At the same time, professionals such as Gesell and Watson published popular books that disseminated their ideas about childhood and its management beyond professional circles. One need only examine the masthead of Parents’ Magazine, an exceptionally popular child-rearing periodical begun in 1926, to find that many of the leading lights in the field—such as Grace Abbott (director of the U.S. Children’s Bureau), Arnold Gesell (director of Yale’s Psycho-Clinic), Lillian Gilbreth (industrial efficiency expert), and Douglas Thom — sat on its

board of advisory editors.*°

Child advice thus became less and less simply a matter of offering homilies to help parents smooth over the inevitable rough spots that arose in dealing with their children. In the late 1910s and 1920s, popular child-rearing literatures paradoxically insisted that a child’s successful development depended on its parents ability to supply and regulate a beneficial environment for the child,

and that raising a child was no longer an exclusively private matter between parent and child. Children were precious natural (and national) resources, and their proper management and deployment required—no less than any other rapidly modernizing industry — the expert assistance of trained scientists who , could offer a full range of techniques and technologies that could be applied (as Parents’ put it on its cover) “from crib to college.” In 1920, the introduction of one child-rearing manual stated:

The author has constantly kept in mind that most parents and teachers are neither familiar with nor interested in technical psychology, biology,

MAKING AMANAGEABLE CHILD ¥*_ 107

or hygiene. .. . They wish to understand why children act in certain ways and how they can most effectively divert them from wrong action. .. . [I] have used terms which can be understood by those who have had little or no study of [these] sciences, though the suggestions for child training -. given herein are based upon data derived from [them]. (O’Shea 1920, 8) — In 1923, a popular child-training manual offered parents a complete system for evaluating and regulating the child, and warned the parent in stark terms that | It is now evident that certain acts of standardized value must be given par-

ents ... that they may teach them to their children with the purpose of _ scoring the proficiency with which the child performs them. ... Whatever

, the result of the tests the values of the acts should be recognized and re, _ corded on the score sheet for the purpose of giving the child his social or character grade. .. . for the day is not far distant when society, and schools, _as well as professional and business interests, will ask for a standardized

and verified character score. (Clark 1923, 9) a Oo , In order that the parent could score her child on its development, this author _ broke down the child’s actions and behaviors into “acts of standardized value” , graded by age, such as “At eighteen months he should help set and clear off the table; wipe a selected dish or two; paste strips of paper to make squares and crosses; unpin safety-pins in clothing; unbutton and pull off shoes and stockings; use handkerchief and replace it in his pocket” (13, emphasis original). The text also encouraged the parent to take notes on the child’s development and provided space for those notes following the description of each developmen- _

tal stage. a a

, __ As the decade progressed, the message delivered to parents in child-rearing , manuals and periodicals was that the analogy between them and industrial effi- _ | ciency experts wasn't casual: they were professionals with a job to do. A 1927 _ manual for a correspondence course in parenting published by the Institute of Child Welfare at the University of Minnesota put the matter quite bluntly: “It , is only recently that we have come to recognize parenthood as a profession— _ to see that merely becoming a mother or father does not bring the knowledge and ability necessary for a good parent. By reading, studying, by acquaintance _ with the experiences of others, we may gain much that will help us in our task of bringing out the best there is in the child” (Faegre and Anderson 1927,

n.p.). Like the professions of developmental psychology, pediatrics,andhome economics that supported it, parenting had (at least in its popular representation) attained all the markers of professionalism, including a literature, study

, 108 * CHAPTER TWO Oe |

groups, and data sharing practices. In his popular 1928 manual Psychological Care of Infant and Child, John B. Watson, the leading proponent of behaviorism, would warn: The oldest profession of the race to-day is facing failure. This profession is

parenthood. Many thousands of mothers do not even know that parenthood should be numbered among the professions. They do not realize that there are any special problems involved in rearing children. .. . In happy contrast [to these mothers]... the modern mother... is beginning to find that the rearing of children is the most difficult of all professions, more difficult than engineering, than law, or even than medicine itself. (Watson 1928, 15-16)

During the 1920s, then, professional and popular literatures began to describe parents as virtual middle managers in what was imagined as a national childrearing project. It was their job to use the tools provided by professionals in the proper upbringing of their children, and those children would in turn grow up to be evidence of how well they had performed their managerial duties. “Parents slant their children from the very moment of birth,” Watson warned his readers (1928, 39), “nor does the slanting process ever end. The old, threadbare adage, ‘As the twig is bent so is the tree inclined, takes on a fresh meaning. You daily slant your children; you continue the process until they leave you. ... Ithas become so fixed in their modes of behaviour, and even in their very thoughts,

young in our own image.” , that nothing can ever wholly eradicate it. Truly do we inevitably create our ,

Given the public and professional enthusiasm for imagining child care as a quasi-Taylorist enterprise in which parents played the part of middle managers — applying techniques provided for them by experts and gathering data on their child’s development— Walt Disney Productions’ decision to link its founder’s middle-class, middle-American childhood to his passion for modernizing and rationalizing animation fit well with contemporary ideals in childrearing. Yet what made this public-relations address particularly effective was an increasing concern for the effect of mass-cultural products on children. Disney’s address wasn’t simply analogous to that of child-rearing; it participated in the social and cultural construction of the generic child as a worker in the production of itself as an adult, drawing its raw materials from popular culture.

MAKING AMANAGEABLE CHILD * _ 109

Consuming (in) the Middle Class While the expansion of the progressive project from the local to the national played a significant role in the production of a generic American child, there were, however, other forces at work over which reformers had relatively little control. As efforts to expand public education and child-safe common spaces such as playgrounds succeeded, and as moviegoing spaces and practices became standardized, the children of the middle class were more likely to mix with their counterparts from the working class than they had been in decades previous. If the early years of the century had centered on assimilating immigrant and working-class children (and adults) into an American culture that was implicitly middle class and Anglo Saxon, by the r910s and 1920s that project was expanded to ensure that the children of the middle class, who were begin-

ning to participate in an emerging mass culture, didn’t slip their class moorings and drift into the profligate ways from which their new working-class peers were being rescued. Even as it encouraged a democratic mixing that was beneficial to the lower classes, an emerging American mass culture threatened to undermine the basic progressive values deemed essential to the nation’s future. As popular child-rearing author Dorothy Canfield Fisher put it in Self

Reliance (1916): od

The whole trend in American life is away from the old, plainly visible, individual responsibility. . . . itis apparent that to muddle-headed people, and

, to unformed minds like children’s minds, the fact that so often in modern America one may press a button and be served, seems to relieve one of any

_ responsibility about what goes on behind the button. It is also apparent that for the naturally indolent mass of humanity, and for children with no experience in life, there is a great danger of coming to rely so entirely on

(Fisher 1916, 3) , , | Oo

the electric button and its slaves that the wheels of initiative will be broken. —

Although the child of which Fisher wrote was implicitly of the middle class, and the looming threat of “slavery” seemed to suggest an indolence that led to downward class mobility, she still deployed the generic sign of “child.” As the discourse of child-saving expanded to embrace a general project of protecting all children from society’s excesses, appeals once based on ethnicity, assimilation, and uplift became more broadly applicable, and childhood became both an actual and an imaginary location for rewriting the boundaries of class and ethnicity. (In the era of Plessy and immigrant exclusion acts, the bounds of race remained far less fluid.)?” Appeals for uplift, which had made use of middle-

110 * CHAPTER TWO /

class fears about the effects of unwashed newcomers on American culture, were increasingly subsumed within a more generalized conception that the fate of the nation now hinged on the well-being of all children. This gradual reinscription of the meaning of the child in social discourse would work to overwrite the very terms that had recently been so important to it and would produce a generic American child which would require entrepreneurs such as Walt Disney to supply it with the products necessary to preserve and nurture it. , For the concerned parent of the 1920s and 1930s, then, a parent’s hard. work

to regulate the domestic environment for optimal effect could in principle easily be undone by the child’s consumption of items from a popular culture in which values based in class and ethnicity were often hopelessly jumbled. Although they extended to radio, cheap pulp publications, and even public education, these fears often coalesced, sometimes to the point of hysteria, around the practice of moviegoing. This activity not only took the child out of the home and into the socially unregulated (except for the small matter of | Jim Crow color lines) public space of a theater in which it watched movies capable of transmitting any number of values, but which also encouraged the child to purchase ancillary products with which it might disrupt the moral efficiency of the domestic economy. Thus an important part of the parent’s training as middle manager in her child’s upbringing involved obtaining practical tools for regulating her child’s consumption —in particular, its viewing practices. Popular child-management books offered advice on how to select

movies, which ranged from a few paragraphs in sections on socializing or consumption to whole chapters devoted to the subject. Even the Payne Fund weighed in with help, publishing a book for parents and teachers to use in teaching children proper viewing tastes and habits, How to Appreciate Motion Pictures (Dale 1938 [1933]).”*

For the most part, though, child-rearing books of the period discussed the possible consequences of lax parental regulation of media consumption in broad terms but offered little concrete advice on how that regulation was to operate. As manuals for managing the domestic environment, the texts devoted the bulk of their advice and parent-training to the particulars of managing the child’s behaviors and development as they occurred in the home. For practical advice on how best to regulate the child’s life as a public being and nascent consumer, women’s magazines such as McCalls, Good Housekeeping, the Ladies’ Home Journal, and Parents’ offered features designed to teach parents what to look for in movies and how to influence the regulation of movie production. These articles encouraged the parent to attend movies with her child and to practice choosing movies that, far from being a detriment, might actu-

| MAKING AMANAGEABLE CHILD *_ III

ally benefit the child, as did a feature in Parents’ which suggested that “haphaz-

ard attendance, on the part of parents and children, at the local movie theatre is of little value, but careful selection of the pictures boys and girls see can be of real benefit in helping them to consider life values and right attitudes. Itcan prove a thoroughly educational experience” (Lasch 1937, 26). _

It wasn’t the city, the state, the nation, or some other associational group that was to be responsible for regulating the child’s consumption habits, but the parent. This type of reasoning — with its implicit assumption of a middle-

class, single-income household in which the mother was free to either attend movies with children or to closely monitor their public life — furthered the idea

of the normal American child as developing out of a naturally middle-class environment. More than that, it also encouraged parents to develop a conception of movies and their producers that would contribute positive elementsto _ the normal child’s environment. And, in an article that offered to help parents in that task, and around the margins of which Mickey and Minnie Mouse and Donald Duck cavorted, Disney was singled out as providing the antithesis of _

the detrimental film: = , , | The motion picture producers are not as much to blame as we if our children see such pictures. They say frankly they are in the business of

making pictures for adults, not children. Ours is the responsibility of keep, ing our youngsters away from sex-filled pictures, eternal triangle and adul- — tery themes, horror films. ae. Instead we should see that the youngsters see other types of feature films, plus the Mickey Mouse, Silly Symphony, , newsreels, travelogues, nature films, and so on. (Lasch 1937, 112)

By the mid-1930s, Disney had developed a distinct advantage in this regard through the licensing of an incredible array of products — from pajamas to milk _ bottles, notebooks, wristwatches, handkerchiefs, and more — that could prop-

: erly and completely fill the natural, middle-class environment of the normal child. Even the working- class parent who hoped for more for her child could purchase a piece of this domestic fantasy, so wide was the range of products

that bore the company’s imprimatur. oe | :

Yet since new movies appeared weekly, parents could find more practical and immediate information in popular periodicals. Beginning in the late 1920s, | Parents’ Magazine published a monthly guide to movies, which rated movies according to whether they were appropriate for adults, youths, or small children; included capsule descriptions of new releases; and urged parents to save each issue for future reference. (See figure 12.) This guide, Parents’ assured its , readers, was based on not “the views of one person, but the composite judg-

112. * CHAPTERTWO | | Oo

ment of a number of leading women’s organizations . . . and of certain other

well-qualified reviewers” (“Family Movie Guide” 1939, 62). Nor was Parents’ alone in this service; other family-oriented periodicals such as The Rotarian and Christian Century also produced guides for their readers along similar lines.

Parents’ in particular, though, went out of its way to recommend movies to parents, awarding one or more movies a month a medal of honor, as well as conferring special silver and gold medals on particularly deserving fare. (By the late 1930s, Disney won several of these a year, and the magazine awarded Walt Disney a special medal for “outstanding service to children.”) The U.S. Children’s Bureau even recommended the Parents’ guide to concerned parents.*°

At the height of struggles around the enforcement of the Motion Picture Production Code, during which the Payne Fund studies reproduced the normal child as the site for determining movie effects (and as susceptible to those effects), Parents’ movie guide was emblematic of a number of locations where family audiences took shape. The guide was important enough in this regard that major studios often ran advertisements alongside it and featured its awards in their public relations. The guide was particularly well-disposed to Disney, forgiving the company, for instance, for rewriting Pinocchio because “the spirit of the tale is always enhanced by [Walt Disney’s] imaginative treatment” and announcing that “The Parents’ Magazine, desiring to encourage the produc-

tion of motion pictures suitable for whole-family audiences, is giving recognition to outstanding films of this kind. It is pleased to announce that a medal has been awarded to ‘Pinocchio, the December, 1939, movie-of-the-month for family audiences” (“Family Movie Guide” 1939, 65). Given that Parents’ presented itself as a reporter of the most scientific and effective approaches to child-rearing, endorsements such as these improved Disney's image as producing media beneficial for children. Only one example of the operation of the idea of childhood during the 1930s, Pinocchio’s achievement of the status of “real boy” at the end of Disney’s film

was supported by a matrix which reinscribed the class and racial underpinnings of that reality in a web of discourses and practices that linked the scientific process of isolating the characteristics of the normal American child to those of reproducing that child in the bodies and behaviors of real children. The popular assumption regarding children and movies at the time was that every child in the theater would partake not only of Pinocchio’s triumph, but of Walt Disney as the motive force behind that triumph. To watch Pinocchio was to consume Pinocchio; to consume Pinocchio was to consume Walt Disney. To consume Walt Disney was to ingest the qualities essential to Americanness that were required for its reproduction in subsequent generations. In the MAKING AMANAGEABLE CHILD ¥* 113

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:7 see oomovies : . 23 : : . —ts ,/SO: that :are. harmful.”

figure of Walt Disney, that essential Americanness joined naturalized markers of middle-class American culture with principles of industrial efficiency to suggest that the impact of industrialization and modernization (that is, mass cul-

ture) could be regulated by providing the child with a material environment and popular media infused with the values and behaviors needed for it to efhciently reproduce that culture in its development. For it was not enough that Disney’s own childhood recapitulated that ideal development; it was also necessary to demonstrate that the many workers involved in the industrial process of animation would not dilute it, that the spirit of Disney himself was present in every phase of manufacture.

Disney and Efficiently Engineered Entertainment Needless to say, the child’s environment was composed of more than simply the furnishings in its home. It also included clothing, toys, games, toiletries, books, music, and movies. If parents were to efficiently manage their children’s development, then even the products of popular culture, particularly of the mass media, had to be taken into account. By the 1930s a well-defined popular discourse around the potentially detrimental or beneficial effects of the movies operated in the United States— one that suggested that the means of producing mass entertainments could determine the nature of the children who consumed them. In the case of the Payne Fund Studies, it was not only the means by which those effects were studied—by electrical measuring devices, sociological surveys, and psychological profiles; a broader complex of discourses argued for the benefits of regulating the industry through scientific management. Disney, it seemed, had just such an operation. By the middle of the 1930s, not only was the company distributing under its name a wide range of products for children’s domestic consumption as ancillaries to its films, it was also working to link the efficiency of its industrial operation to the beneficial nature of those

products. Depicting itself as an industrial facility in the business of producing children’s entertainment, Disney let it be known that, like parenting, anima-

tion was a difficult and extremely labor-intensive art. By the 1930s, the Disney , studios had grown from its beginnings as a relatively collective operation in which a small group of men shared responsibility for the various tasks involved

in making a cartoon to become a highly complex and diversified industrial organization.*’ Between 1928 and 1939, the studios released 198 short cartoons, as well as the feature-length Snow White. A ten-minute film required roughly

MAKING A MANAGEABLE CHILD ¥*_ [15

14,400 drawings; Snow White consisted of over 2 million (Walt Disney Produc| tions 1938, 36-37; Hollister 1940). In 1942, Disney himself told Time that it would have taken one man 250 years to have produced Snow White (Smoodin 1993).

The company broke up its facilities into divisions that thought up and wrote stories, created initial and final drawings for those stories, inked and painted the

| drawings, created music and visual and sound effects, and shot and produced film —as well as departments of administration, housekeeping, and a school where artists learned Disney techniques (Hollister 1940, De Roos 1963).*? In

: its studio tours and press releases, the company touted this division of labor as exemplary of its modernity, and as proof of its commitment to a Fordist imaginary of efficiency as humanized industrial practice: Walt Disney’s rambling, Spanish studio in Hollywood, California, is a factory for making myths. A factory, because there the technical problem of producing the 10,000 or so separate drawings that go into a one-reel animated cartoon (some eight minutes of entertainment) is solved with the utmost speed and efficiency which modern industrial methods will per-

mit... . In Disney’s studio a twentieth-century miracle is achieved: bya system as truly of the machine age as Henry Ford’s plant at Dearborn, true art is produced. (“The Big Bad Wolf” 1934, 88)

In.a fetishistic celebration of repetition and standardization that recalled Futurism in its boyish optimism about the ultimate good embodied in the rapid and regular output of mass production, Disney encouraged depictions of its plant as a hypermodern industrial concern, as if perhaps the very regularity of the operation were a component in the guarantee that its products were beneficial.*? “If a privileged investigator could stay around for the six months it takes to complete a typical cartoon short,” an anonymous reporter for Time reported after taking a tour, “he would find it a highly efficient, if occasionally

cockeyed, procedure.” |

First step in the making of any Disney picture is the story conference, _ at which the Disney story staff gathers to sort out ideas. . . . [then] the story is adapted into sequences, scenes, shots, and the main action illustrated... witha series of rough sketches. A director is then assigned to conduct the picture through to its conclusion. He and subordinate music, art, sound effects and dialogue directors decide on timing. In a typical Disney

, cartoon, the action and sound move according to an intricate schedule in which the frames of the film are synchronized with the musical beat or sound effects... . While the musical staff prepares the score, the dia-

116 * CHAPTER TWO

logue director collects his cast of voices. ... The sound effects department records a third track. In the recording room, sound engineers then synchronize the three sound tracks on one. Meanwhile background artists have been sketching out scenes. . . . [and] the story is now ready for the

animation. (“Mouse and Man” 1937, 20) |

More than simply factories, however, Disney's facilities were often compared to scientific laboratories and were described in such obsessive detail in _ the company’s public relations, from a state-of-the-art air-conditioning system

that filtered out cel-damaging dust, right down to its paint-mixing operation. | In its press book for Snow White (1937), Disney depicted the color scheme of the movie as deriving from “months of research . . . by the chemists in the paint laboratory” in which they developed “secret formulas” for the Disney artists to use (Walt Disney Productions 1938, 37). This public-relations language — whether lifted from pr releases or gathered on studio tours — was picked up by magazine writers and circulated freely, as in this piece from the Atlantic Monthly: “The pigments are made in the Disney laboratory. They are issued to

| the painters in numbered and sealed and inspected china jars, each containing just enough paint to cover the specific task — not for parsimony so much as to ensure uniformity and permanence of color tone” (Hollister 1940, 29). Neither a motley collection of pouty, unreliable, and egotistical stars and directors, nor a slapdash collection of artists, Disney billed itself as a hightech assembly line, a scientifically regulated industrial concern that required no external oversight because its own internal regulation was so meticulous.

This very regularity, this scientific approach to the production of cartoons, placed the studio apart from those of the immigrants, petulant Europeans, and working-class hedonists who produced films of questionable value to American children. Disney’s operation was apparently so well regulated that when the United States entered World War II, the studios had little trouble retooling their operation to produce technical-instruction and industrial-safety films. As independent producer Walter Wanger crowed (1943, 19), “If every American could visit the studio, he would have a new admiration for his country. There is nothing comparable to it in all the world. More experts, scientists, and technicians operate under Disney’s roofs than in any other one organization in the universe.” That a company that was becoming synonymous with beneficial children’s entertainments would have showcased its industrial techniques and employee

relations might seem a bit odd. There is, after all, nothing cute and cuddly about assembly-line production or high-tech air conditioning. Yet the com-

MAKING AMANAGEABLE CHILD ¥*_ 117

pany’s facilities played a substantial role in its public relations, and although its a workers were touted as models of industrial efficiency, they were also depicted

| as members of one big, happy family, with Walt as their avuncular leader. For _ a corporation that was attempting to corner a substantial part of an emerg- _ ing market aimed at children and families, this was an intelligent choice. Although until recently cartoons have been commonly considered children’s fare, at the time this wasn’t necessarily so. Certainly, other major animated works of that era—say, Betty Boop or the Merrie Melodies— weren't strictly “children’s fare”: they were often filled with sexual innuendo, cross-dressing, po-

, litical satire, and explosive violence (see, for example, Sandler 1998). And, as_ part of the larger Hollywood movie-making industry, cartoons produced at the larger studios always ran the risk of being associated with a culture and a lifestyle that were often vilified as decadent and corrosive to American values.

In the metaphysical fantasy in which the character of a producer was trans- | ‘mitted directly to the consumer through its products, to mark the activity of | ~ one’s production as wholesome was to set one’s product apart as wholesome, too. Thus, a rhetoric that stressed the industrial nature of Disney’s plant was balanced with one that focused on the family nature of the business. The en-

| trance to the studio was adorned with an image of Disney’s “son,” and its public facade suggested an environment given over to (well-regulated) play:

, Mickey himself, his hand outstretched in welcome, is perched on top of an electric sign which announces that this is the Walt Disney studio. The courtyard is divided, California style, into little sections of green grass.

There is a ping-pong table in one corner... . At the extreme right is a- two-car garage; a miniature garage in which two very small cars are kept. | Name-plates proclaim that Mickey owns one of the cars and Minnie, his

_ playmate and leading woman, the other. (Pringle 1932, 7) , | | At the center of this world was Walt Disney himself. Although Disney was | litle older than most of his employees, he was regularly depicted asacom- — passionate and wise father figure and his workers as playful and imaginative , children for whom he wanted only the best: “Knowing that incessant tension also is fatal to work calling for intelligence, imagination and humor, Disney | | tries to give his artists and writers two days a week for play. His ambition is _

, to pay his employees well enough for them to save for old age and still enjoy , , living as they go along. Success is worthless, he says, if health is gone at middle |

age” (Churchill 1934, 13). | 7 , , At the same time, however, Disney was portrayed as having maintained a childlike spirit, one that informed his workplace management practices, 118 * CHAPTER TWO —

hence his company’s products. Referring to the new multiplane camera that his workers had developed for him, a gleefully childlike Disney was quoted in Time as saying, “It was always my ambition to own a swell camera... and now, godammit, I got one. I get a kick just watching the boys operate it, and remembering how I used to have to make ‘em out of baling wire” (“Mouse and Man” 1937, 20). And even though Disney’s facilities were industrial laboratories, this down-home attitude apparently made the official regulation of those facilities unnecessary: “With a staff of 1,000, there is not a time clock in the place. Disney does not want his men to feel that they are in a factory; rather he prefers a natural sense of obligation that goes with a professional calling” ~ (Churchill 1938, 23). In spite of the absence of time clocks, however, according to another journalist who took the studio tour, Walt Disney still noticed when some of his employees showed up late and left early, and he threatened punitive action. The author speculated that “such drastic measures would probably have taken the form of, say, closing the men’s clubroom, free massage parlor, and squash court for half a day” (Hollister 1940). In other words, Walt was a father whose tendency to indulgence derived from his identification with his childlike workers, —

and whose impulse to discipline his employees consisted of temporarily suspending luxuries unheard of in most industrial facilities. (This article appeared just before the Disney animators went out on strike, complaining primarily that they were not being properly credited for their work or receiving a fair share of the company’s profits.) Walt Disney was depicted as the ideal parent of his workers, one who ameliorated the rigors of a highly regulated industrial environment by investing it with his spirit of play and invention, and through the achievement of workplace efficiency by way of the careful deployment and utilization of his facilities, resources, and workers: “To discover in each artist the caprice he likes best to draw, then to harness that specialty, is just one more example of Walt’s determination to use the best available person for every task, even if he has to make that person the best” (Hollister 1940, 699).** The depiction of Walt Disney Productions as an industrial facility dedicated to the production of children’s amusements, then, maintained a tension between industrial efficiency and artistic abandon, between regimentation and carefree play, not unlike that of the Seven Dwarfs in Snow White (1938). In this fantasy, personal growth was achieved by the subordination of one’s self to regulation by a benevolent mechanism, as did the Algeresque, down-at-theheels, damaged commercial playthings in the public relations for Disney's Broken Toys (1935): “In these modern days of mass production and super speed you can rely on the Walt Disney characters to keep their mode of motion and living MAKING AMANAGEABLE CHILD *_ 119

right up to the minute. . . . In ‘Broken Toys’ the doll characters, in an effort to

rehabilitate themselves, construct an assembly line on a par with those to be

_ found in our automobile factories” (Walt Disney Productions 1935). _ _ The guarantee of the benevolence of the machine was its inspiration by Walt Disney’s ineffably American character, and by his paternal vigilance. | The Disney studios were represented as a well-oiled machine that turned out | products which were not only beneficial for children but designed for the __ growth and personal improvement of Disney employees. This was the channel through which Walt Disney’s character made its way from his body to those of the children who consumed Disney products: the inspiration and regulation

of Disney workers made them into conduits for his vision, less artisans than fabricators, or eternally apprentices, practicing the master’s craft in a tightly

controlled environment. Oo | ee

Disney’s choice to capture the children’s market by foregrounding its indus-

trial practices, and even investing its characters with “up to the minute” Ford-

, ist impulses, speaks to the popularity of the discourse of scientific management in the quasi-professional, management-oriented child-rearing programs , | that were popular at the time. In addition, the company’s willingness to appear a perfectly regulated entity spoke to prevailing concerns about the effects of movies on children. Hollywood during the 1930s was often depicted by its _

critics as an industry out of control, its producers unable to properly regu- , late the productive or personal activities of its writers, directors, and stars,

. and its products tainted by that permissive environment. Finally, Disney’s ex- | _clusive focus on animation during the 1930s added to the company’s aura of ©

absolute control over its subjects. In an emerging children’s media market in which concerned adult consumers were attempting to locate products beneficial for their children, animation offered an apt metaphor for child-rearing, _ in which parents attempted to invest their children with the proper values and

| behaviors so that they would develop the well-rounded character needed to compete in a competitive and rapidly changing labor market. Like Disney’s _ studios, the ideal home was imagined as an industrial facility dedicated to the _ efficient production of well-regulated (and ultimately self-regulating) subjects, yet still grounded in the warmth and sentimentality of family life. Like Disney’s workers, parents would apply the scientific methods supplied by child-rearing , experts, tempering them with love and warmth, laboring to animate their children through a process in which regimes of efficiency would guarantee a _ product imbued with values and behaviors that would enable it to become a

successful member of a democratic capitalist society. ,

120 * CHAPTER TWO a , oS

Professionalization and the Production of the Managed Child At the beginning of the twentieth century, the application of scientific discourses to child-rearing occurred largely in the colloquies of child-study organizations, and subsequently in the public appeals of child-saving. By the 1920s and the rise of Walt Disney Productions, however, the application of scientific regimes of child-rearing dominated popular discourse. A comparison of

two passages separated by about twenty-five years illustrates this gradual but ! profound change in discourse about childhood. The first, from 1902, is by progressive reformer Jane Addams:

The family as well as the state we are all called upon to maintain as the highest institutions which the race has evolved for its safeguard and protection. But merely to preserve these institutions is not enough. There come periods of reconstruction, during which the task is laid upon a passing generation, to enlarge the function and carry forward the ideal of a long-established institution. ...'The family in its entirety must be carried out into the larger life. Its various members together must recognize and acknowledge the validity of the social obligation. (Addams 1960, 144-45) Deploying forceful rhetoric such as this in tracts and in the many public lectures she gave, Addams argued for the assimilation of immigrants and the working class through the education of their children, their “uplift” into a social consciousness taken for granted by their betters. Hers was part ofa call for programs at the local, state, and national levels that would save poor children from conditions that affected them as a group. Needless to say, this rhetoric was addressed not to the people it wished to improve, but to a middle-class audience that was meant to feel responsible for its inferiors, and which was supposed to take action on their behalf.** The discourse of child-saving produced an immigrant child for consumption by a concerned middle class that was distinctly other than its middle-class peers. It was a child marked by its ethnic origins, by its class position, and even occasionally by its gender. That it would attend school was not a given, nor that it would derive any moral or intellectual benefit from it. This child’s potential was primarily as a problem: either as a burden to society or as a potential criminal or revolutionary. The second piece, written in 1928 by a leading expert in the emerging field of child development (with an introduction by Grace Abbott, chief of the U.S. Children’s Bureau, alumna of Hull House, and herself an author of childrearing guides) offered practical advice to the parents of any child, (ostensibly)

regardless of its race, class, or ethnicity: MAKING AMANAGEABLE CHILD + 12I

Normality in the field of the child’s mental life is concerned withhis ability _ to live up to an arbitrary standard, set for his chronological age, in hisintel- _

| lectual achievements and his social adjustments. . . . The normal child is capable of meeting and adjusting to the everyday problems of life as found

, in the social, racial, and economic level to which he has been born, under © what might be termed average conditions. . . . Our interest is in helping | parents to understand why the problem child is often only a symptom ofa | problem environment, or that perhaps [the child’s problem] is acommon

problem of the phase through which he is passing. (Thom 1928, viii) a This child-rearing manual, Everyday Problems of the Everyday Child, ‘was essentially an expanded version of Child Management (Thom 1925), a pamphlet that

the author, Douglas Thom, had issued three years earlier under the auspices | _ of the Institute of Child Welfare at the University of Minnesota, with the sup-

| port of the Children’s Bureau. In both, the emphasis was on giving individual _ parents practical tools (from advice on how to design the home environment,

to methods for observing the child, to charts and graphs for recording and , | understanding those observations) for ensuring that they were producing a normal child. And both are examples of how, in the space of twenty-odd years, — the center of discourses and practices surrounding children and childhood in

the United States shifted from a concern with the protection and salvation of _ _ children of certain class and ethnic positions to one devoted to the production of the individual child using norms ostensibly unmarked by race or class. _ (Although Thom referred to race and class in his introduction, the rest of his

a text outlined an environment available only to middle-class parents. Where photographic evidence was used in such manuals, the children featured were

inevitably white, fair-complected, and usually male.) Although the discourse of child-saving continued in an ever smaller measure, child-rearing had grown from a cottage industry to a fully articulated social scientific enterprise that en-

compassed both child-rearing manuals for the middle class and an abstracted | - public child. Most significant in this change was the development and scientific

elaboration of the concept of the normal child, and the shift in responsibility | for the well-being of that child from social groups or institutions onto its indi-

vidual parents. In this new discourse, the American child was no longer the product and responsibility of its macrosocial environment, but the handiwork © of individual parents: “The home is a workshop which, unfortunately, often _

spoils much good material. The parents are the ones who control the destiny of the child and make his environment to a large extent. Their mental ability, their control of their emotions, their interests, particularly their interestinthe

122° * CHAPTER TWO , _

child, their ambitions or lack of them, their moral standards— these all determine what the child shall make out of the endowment nature has given him” (Thom 1925, 34).

This new discourse did not replace the progressive paradigm, however. Rather, it reproduced the progressive argument for uplift within the scientific guidelines for producing the normal child. At both a professional and public level, the discourse of child-rearing in the 1920s and 1930s was essentially pro-

gressivism writ small: the middle-class home that had been both the ideal of reformers and the backdrop for early child study became the natural environment of the normal child, while the middle-class, Protestant values of deferred gratification, self-control, and thrift continued on as behaviors which were to be developed by regulating that child’s relationship to its natural environment:

Conforming to rules and regulations, obeying customs and traditions, being well mannered and properly groomed, all contribute to what we call adjustment to life; but one may be very unhappy and inefficient if, while acquiring these habits of conformity, he fails to develop a broader view of life, which embraces happiness, peace, contentment, love, sympathy, and the finer sentiments. These attitudes are absorbed by the child from the atmosphere in which he lives, and are not acquired through training... . The conduct of the child is simply his [instinctive] reaction to his environment. (Thom 1928, 39)

In this model, the environment itself carried those “finer sentiments” and the child absorbed them through its interaction with that environment. Like the immigrant child who might have received an education but returned home each day to the street and tenement life that formed its substantial behavioral matrix, the child of the 1920s and 1930s could be trained to act properly, but if the environment its parents provided for it were emotionally and behaviorally impoverished, that training would benefit the child little. Worse than that, it would be “inefficient” —the child’s training would put it at odds with its environment, forcing it to use valuable personal resources to resolve the contradictions it encountered. In language that hinted at the concepts of equilibrium and harmony that Piaget was developing in Europe, and which would have a significant influence on the postwar notion of a natural child promoted by Benjamin Spock, authors such as Thom blended progressive notions of uplift with industrial methods and imagery of management and efficiency in which the normal child was an efficient child, and its environment a space designed to maximize that efficiency.*° Nowhere was this blending of the progressive idea of uplift — with its emMAKING AMANAGEABLE CHILD * 123

bedded assumptions about the natural and evolutionarily proper quality of white, middle-class culture —with the rigors of empirical observation associated with scientific management clearer than in the First Berkeley Growth Study. Conducted at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1928, the study was intended to do no less than chart “the mental development and physical growth of normal individuals, observed from birth to maturity” (Institute of Child Welfare 1938). This task would be accomplished by monitoring the development of children “from month to month and year to year” (Bayley 1940, 2). Tracking would include laboratory observation and measurement; home visits and the recording of parents’ income, occupation, and education; photographs and X-rays; motion pictures of creeping and walking; and “observations

of behavior in standardized social situations . . . [and] at eight and one-half years the Rorschach ink blot test” (Institute of Child Welfare 1938, 4; Bayley 1940). As significant as this array of observational technologies, however, were the parameters by which the researchers chose their subjects: In the group are 30 girls and 31 boys, nearly all of North European or early

American stock. All the children were born in hospitals; this made possible the scientific measurement of each child from the first days of his | life. The parents of the children were white, English-speaking residents of Berkeley. ... Colored races were excluded in order to eliminate the complications of gross racial differences; parents not speaking English were excluded because of [language difficulties]... transient cases... were excluded, because it was our aim . . . to study these children from birth to maturity. (Bayley 1940, 2)

Framed as simple commonsense choices made to limit the statistical noise of too many independent variables, the study’s guidelines reproduced, in a longitudinal study meant to locate norms, progressive-era notions of white-

| ness and of middle-class life as representative of the natural environment within which those norms occurred. The decision had a perverse logic: conscious decisions to practice racial exclusion were justified by the requirements of scientific sampling and the production of latitudinally verifiable results. At a strictly visual level, conformity in the sample allowed for the presentation of images of norms in which changes in age could be presented without “complications” produced by race for each gender. Far from exceptional, this was _ standard practice (see, for example, figure 13). And in terms of the production of scientific knowledge, it fit long-standing assumptions that norms generated by these methods— which were designed to set benchmarks for parents and researchers alike — would be applicable across race, ethnicity, and class. The

124. * CHAPTER TWO ,

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supposition in the 1920s, and into the 1930s, was that parents were to use information generated in such studies to adjust their child-rearing practices, as well as the environment in which the management of the child’s development

took place. _ |

Bodies and Behaviors os | , a Management-based child-rearing discourses overlapped with Disney’s celebra-.

| tion of its own industrial techniques in the particularization of the child’s environment and the serial segmentation of its physical and behavioral development. Both addressed the parent anxious to manage her child’s entry into (mass) American culture, and both emphasized regimes of management, con-.

| trol, and efficiency as a means of reproducing that ideal American culture. _ Film production in general—and animation in particular— offered a compel-

| ling analogy to the anxieties and expectations of parenting.“’ Even in live-action film, the director had the ability, through instruction, camera work, and edit- : ing, as well as the command of sound, makeup, lighting, and so on, to master

, the presentation of the actor and the visual field. Ultimately, though, the actor’s expressions and voice were her own, as was her offscreen life. Not so for the animated character. Besides being incredibly labor-intensive, animation also _ allowed for nearly absolute control over character and setting. The very shape of the body, the face, the clothing, every movement and background — all were , created by the animators, all were subject to review and revision. And the ani- _ mated character had no life of its own off camera through which to bring ill

repute to its studio. In an era in which the public was both enamored of child , stars and concerned for their welfare (Eckert 1974), this may well have been -a comfort, enough that one could even crack wise about taking advantage of an animated character: “The New Spirit (Disney) reveals the astonishing fact

that one of the world’s most beloved cinema actors earns less than $50 a week. | _ That miserable retainer not only has to support himself . . but also has to _ , feed, clothe and house his three adopted nephews. This underpaid box-office

_ paragon: Donald Duck” (“The New Pictures” 1942, 36). ee , More than that, one could much better ensure that the character, in its ap- - ,

pearance, its movements, and its behavior, expressed exactly what it was sup- ,

-__- posed to, exactly what would be most beneficial to the child viewer. As the | | 19308 progressed, Disney made much of this ability, extending its discourse of industrial control beyond the bodies of its workers, to include those ofits char- acters. As it had depicted Walt watching over and making best use of hisem- _

126 * CHAPTER TWO a

ployees, Disney represented its studios as laboratories in which its artists were busy observing, analyzing, cataloging, and reproducing the gestures, mannerisms, behaviors, and bodies of humans and animals alike.** Following its success with Snow White (1937), Disney expanded its representations of its studios as scientific industrial facilities to include images of its workers using photographic techniques as well as naked-eye observation: Walt was photographed sketching deer, and animators were depicted in word and image as watching live-action films and nature footage in order to better understand human and animal movement and behavior. This was particularly true as Disney features moved from a focus on human characters to films with animal protagonists, _especially Dumbo (1941) and Bambi (1942), about which Walt explained in National Geographic: “ “In Bambi, we had to get closer to nature. So we had to train our artists in animal locomotion and anatomy.’ Walt introduced live ani-

mals into the studio, deer and rabbits and skunks. ‘But they were no good, he says. “They were just pets. So we sent artists out to zoos, and all we got were animals in captivity. Finally I sent out some naturalist-cameramen to photograph the animals in their natural environment’ ” (De Roos 1963, 178).*” Even though Disney was producing animated fables, this public compulsion toward verisimilitude, specifically. represented as a need to get “closer to nature,” carried as its unvoiced Other cinematic practices that delivered the unreal and the unnatural to their audiences. Disney’s complex public-relations address produced the claim that animation, as practiced by Disney, was an exacting industrial process that distilled and delivered essential qualities to its patrons largely unadulterated by creative interpretation other than Disney's. (In subsequent decades, as tropes of regulation and industry lost value in public discourse, Disney would couch its mastery over nature by dwelling less on its physical plant and more on figures such as the “naturalist cameramen” mentioned above, as an extension of its founder’s will. See chapters 4 and 5.) The company also publicized an in-house school in which newly hired car-

toonists were trained to do the same—in much the same way that teachers at Columbia University or parents taking a correspondence course in childmanagement techniques were being trained—by learning to apply categorical systems of behavior and attitude to acute observation of living models to

produce “real” and “natural” animated characters.”° Indeed, Disney animators . have even claimed to have borrowed from studies of child behavior in the pro-

duction of their animated characters. Speaking in a “making-of” video that _ Disney released with its fifty-fifth-anniversary reissue of Bambi (1942), Marc Davis, one of the animators responsible for the title character, stated, “I took

MAKING AMANAGEABLE CHILD + 127

a huge book on baby behavior and every interesting child’s face. . . | would in_ terpret itinto the mask of this young deer. And I think that this was the turning

| point for this character” (Bambi, 55th Anniversary Limited Edition, 1997). oe In this case, then, the original work in which a researcher isolated and categorized aset of infantile behaviors was taken up and transferred to an animated character meant for a children’s market, designed (at least as far as the com-

pany’s public persona intimated) to deliver to the child information essential __ for its own proper character formation. And while in this instance the information was retrospective, at the time Disney quite proudly displayed its artists as they broke down and reassembled the particulars of movement and behav- | ior. In a celebration of the panoptic, the company offered concentric rings of

, observation in which the public observed Walt Disney observing his workers, who observed the world around them in order to deliver it back to the publicin —

its real and natural form. Sometimes, though, as Time happily noted (“Mickey , - Mouse on Parade” 1941, 32), Disney’s workers were put on display all by themselves as they particularized bodies and movements like their counterparts in the industrial practice of scientific management, breaking their work into component parts that might be missed by the naked eye, as when “the Los Angeles County Museum... put on an exhibition [of]. ..a Disney animator at work,

tracing the successive movements of animal armsandlegs.” 7 Disney represented its work, then, as the deployment of the latest scien-

| tific techniques of management, observation, and production to create the full _ range of human (and anthropomorphic) emotions and behaviors—from the wholesome goodness of its protagonists to the (attenuated) evil of its villains, For the middle-class parent attempting to regulate the attitudes and behaviors of her own children, Disney’s success was comforting, as this fan letter suggests: “Bambi was to my children a beautiful experience, and subconsciously _ they must have absorbed a lesson which will make them better human beings. ... You have proved by this kind of picture you not only can entertain but you _ can mold the character of people” (Corken 1942). For the ever larger number of parents enrolling their children in compulsory public school systems that would deploy observation, categorization, and management to produce hierarchies determinative of their future success, the studios’ ability to turn the ~

, cold and calculating technologies of science and observation to the produc-

tion of warm, generous, intelligent, and successful creatures offered an added |

appeal to its entertainment value.*! , . Be

, This last point is important: while Disney increasingly aimed its films at _ , a children’s market, their public relations in the 1930s and into the 1940s targeted adults. When pegged with the label of producing children’s movies, Walt

128 * CHAPTER TWO

Disney invariably replied that he produced “family entertainment.” This was quite true: the movies were for children, but the pr was for their parents — who were expected to regulate their children’s consumption of popular media.

Conclusion: The Production of Anxiety and Its Cure All of [Disney’s products] are aimed at the most vulnerable portion of the adult’s psyche — his feelings for his children. If you have a child,

you cannot escape a Disney character or story even if you loathe it.... The machine’s voice is so pervasive and persuasive that it forces first the child, then the parent to pay tt heed—and money. In essence, Disney’s machine was designed to shatter the two most valuable things about childhood — tts secrets and its silences — thus forcing everyone to share

the same formative dreams. —SCHICKEL 1968, 18

Richard Schickel’s observation that the Disney corporation's web of marketing and product tie-ins created a cultural landscape in which the company’s products were (and are) absolutely unavoidable is undoubtedly true — but it is incomplete. Like most critics of Disney, Schickel is too ready to assign to the man (and the company) credit for having woven this web all by himself. What Schickel ascribes to the corporation — the inimical purpose of colonizing childhood— aptly describes the social and cultural conditions surrounding parents and children in the late 1920s and early 1930s. At that time, childhood was considered a terra incognita that had to be (and was being) charted, analyzed, and categorized, with all of “its secrets and its silences” exposed, explored, and explained. It wasn’t Disney who began this process, but the contemporary

professional and popular programs of child-training and management. The , “playthings” that children made use of in the act of self-production which their parents managed had to come from somewhere, of course, and had to pass some sort of scrutiny. Child-rearing experts such as Gesell, Thom, and Watson, and popular magazines such as Parents’, formed a popular/professional matrix

for the evaluation, promotion, and distribution of the elements proper for a child’s environment — while companies such as Disney produced the materials to be judged and passed. While this was certainly a boon for companies such as Disney, it was no less so for the men and women who were building careers and reputations by mapping the contours of the normal child, or for publishers

who printed their work. There was a profound interdependence between the three: the experts needed exposure; the publishers needed both content and MAKING AMANAGEABLE CHILD + _ 129

to consumers. - - 7

advertising revenue; and competitors in the children’s market needed access If the child was at the center of this matrix, however, that didn’t mean that.

the parent had been shoved aside. Child-rearing programs didn’t insert them-

| selves between parent and child. Rather, they enlisted parents as native infor- _ - mants and amateur researchers who were participate in a collective process __ of child-rearing that ultimately extended beyond the family. To be a parent at that time ideally involved the semiprofessional micromanagement of a child’s _

environment, from clothes, to toys, to furniture, to books, to movies, right , down to the tone of one’s voice —all of which could determine (for ill or for good) the child’s future as an adult and as an American. Even the parent who

, didn’t subscribe to such programs had to deal with their influence in defining the nature of childhood at the time. And, as the nation moved toward universal

public education, exposure to this attitude began to filter into the home as par- ,

, ents came into contact with a growing class of professionally trained teachers, guidance counselors, and school administrators. The terms of address made the stakes clear: if a child faltered in its development, the responsibility lay with the parents (most likely with the mother). This sense of the potential for _ failure and its redress in the assistance of experts informed the tone of both — the advertising and the articles in magazines such as Parents’ or Ladies’ Home Journal, and in child-rearing pamphlets and books. Mothers were represented, ©

, both in images and in words, as living in a terrorized state of anxiety for their | children’s safety, well-being, and future, and as relieved of that anxiety by the =

advice and products offered to them (see figure 14). , , Central to both the production of this anxiety and its assuagement was the

notion that consumption was itself productive — that childrenin particulardistilled in their emerging selves the values and behaviors inherent in the massproduced items they enjoyed and would reproduce them in their adult lives. _ As Marshall Sahlins (1991) has noted, the “modern totemism” of twentiethcentury middle-class thought has come to imagine consumption as “an exchange of meanings, a discourse” unto itself. When Sahlins suggests that usevalues and virtues are attached to objects only after they have been consumed, * he refers to the personal status of the consumer, the “cultural capital” gained (or lost) through acts of consumption (Sahlins 1991, 286; Bourdieu and Passeron 1977). Alongside this very personalized and individuating notion of a consump-

tion that produces marginal differentiation in status hierarchies, there has de- |

. veloped, in the past century, an idea of consumption as a direct conduit between producer and consumer, in which the virtues and values of the producer

are transmitted directly to the consumer. This has been evident in ongoing - |

130. * CHAPTERTWO ,

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responsibility and anxiety, “°° FEARS it discourses of media effects, in which either the noble or base qualities of a producer were (and are) imagined as delivered directly to media consumers. This idea has always depended upon the notion of classes of individuals —

children, the poor, racial and ethnic others—who, by dint of their primitive natures, are particularly susceptible to the power of media commodities. In the quasi-Darwinian perspective of progressive-era child-study, as well as in its subsequent professional instantiation, the child’s evolutionary recapitulation of the development of civilization — from its primitive origins in infancy, to its arrival at absolute modernity as a middle-class adult— configured acts of con-

sumption as determining the outside limits of that development, the telos of that arrival. More simply put, a child that consumed products imbued with the sensibilities of the working class or of the Old World, would, upon achieving adulthood, reproduce in its worldview and behaviors the values and virtues inherent in those products. A child provided with an environment produced by modern middle-class sensibilities, on the other hand, would absorb them , MAKING AMANAGEABLE CHILD * 13!

and would have the tools necessary to (re)create a modern, middle-class world

| for itself and those around it. Inasmuch as the working-class sensibility (osten- = sibly) concerned itself only with immediate needs and pleasures — the getting of money in exchange for labor and the spending of that money in immediate gratification of wants and needs—while the middle-class, progressive sensibility imagined the ongoing perfection of self and surroundings through the deferment of pleasure, the latter was widely considered more evolved. The child who consumed products imbued with middle-class virtues represented “the race’s” best hope, a creature made aware of its own place in the evolu- _

, , tionary chain of being and of its responsibility to the evolution of its national __

, culture through proper consumption. , - ,

a Child-rearing, then; was far more than a personal affair. Parents were often. . reminded that they had a responsibility, both to their children (that they should have the best possible chance at success) and to the nation as a whole (that |

| it should continue to stand at the vanguard of human civilization, and that the republic be peopled by as many self-sufficient citizens as possible). As the —

epigraph at the bottom of Parents’ editorial page reminded its readers, “The , future of the race marches forward on the feet of little children.” Recapping the findings of the 1930 White House conference on the child, Parents’ editor

Clara Savage Littledale reminded her readers (1931, 9): “In the annals of the | child study and parent education movement, 1930 will be remembered asthe year of the White House Conference on Child Health and Protection. ... Out of that conference must come... a deep realization on the part of mothers and

_ fathers that the bringing up of their children is not an isolated affair in which _ , they alone are concerned but one on which the life of the nation depends.” , These observations went beyond the obvious fact that children grew tobe- > ‘come adults, and adults were citizens. The suggestion of child-management advocates during the 1920s and 1930s was that everything a parent did in pri-

_ vate —every word spoken; every purchase of clothing, books, toys, movies; | , every meal—had consequences that were ultimately public and national. The choices parents made about how to raise their children, and the technologies they deployed in that activity, were interwoven with discourses about what _ ee constituted normal life in America: “Observers and students of human life have come to realize that ‘environment’ has a deeper meaning than mere neigh-

| borhood. . . . This environment, so important for character and personality . making, includes very subtle things as the amount of love and understanding | or its lack, the co-operation and maladjustments of the parents, even such triv- _ ial things as playthings or the tone of voice in which the child is addressed”

(Child Care and Training 1927). a oo

132) * CHAPTER TWO oe a

At an ontological level, the child constituted a signal problem in the consti-

tution of personhood in a mass society formed around democratic capitalism. : Not only was the child transhistorical—delivering a nascent future into the present — it also acted as a bridge between the public and the private (Donzelot

| 1979, Gordon 1990). Where the immigrant child, as threat to and promise for an emerging American mass culture, had provided access to tenements and family relations for progressive reformers, the generic, normal American child

invited, if not the actual regulatory gaze of the state, its perpetual potential presence. As Hamilton Cravens put it, “Presumably popular attitudes had not absorbed or digested all of the ramifications of the normal child. . . . If most children were normal, if, in other words there was no wide gap separating the children of the white middle class from those of other groups in the national population, then possibly the sons and daughters of white middle class might go astray if care were not taken that they were correctly and carefully reared” (1985, 438). In short, efforts to extend the domestic sphere into the public for certain classes through childhood had created the unintended effect of extending the public sphere into the domestic for all classes. In the midst of reconfiguring and regulating this normal child, Disney was almost universally presented— either explicitly or implicitly —as making that “better type of picture” or book, or record, or doll that would help the child along. Still, although the company made much of its acclaim as the paradigm of beneficial children’s entertainment, it didn’t draw the discursive boundaries

that positioned it as paradigmatic. The corporation’s emphasis on its Fordist production principles helped align it with the prevailing rhetoric in childrearing, and that focus gained its affective hook from the representation of the company asa scientifically engineered family fathered and run by a man whose archetypal American trajectory inspired and directed the actions of each of his children/employees. His was the human face put on the image of science, and his life story — which the company told and retold almost compulsively — was the parable of the path to success for every Depression-era child. Walt Disney embodied a faith in the power of science and a paean to the purity and power of the normal that countered anxieties that the child’s entry into popular culture necessarily sacrificed its future as a successful individual and a productive member of society. In the 1920s and 1930s, the moral underpinnings of this middle-class sensibility were condensed into the more modern and scientific concepts of “efhciency” and “management.” An efficiently managed environment reduced the possibility of unwanted social and cultural noise. The more perfectly the child’s environment was constituted — from its furnishings, to clothing, toys, books, MAKING AMANAGEABLE CHILD *_ 133

and even movies— the less distracted that child would be by the noise of other cultural messages, and the more able it would be to fully and efficiently integrate a middle-class sensibility into its worldview. For parents raising children who had far more leisure time and access to a growing consumer market for mass-produced wares than had previous generations, the problem was with how to provide an environment most likely to consistently provide products

imbued with proper virtues, such as hard work and deferred gratification.” Disney provided products suitable to that environment, and child-rearing experts offered tools for managing it. What remained was to link that process to sustaining an ideal American culture, an “American character.” The generic or _ normal child would play a key role in this regenerative logic, acting as a mechanism by which to reliably reproduce that character, the point at which to make the ideal real. To witness the social reproduction of that child, we will travel next to Middletown, a sociological fantasy of an ideal America that captured the popular middle-class imagination of the Depression-era United States.

134. * CHAPTER TWO

5 4 IN MIDDLETOWN

| Would you be interested in visiting a studio which has no sets, no paid actors, a studio whose assets are the creative minds of the artists plus

plenty of ink, drawing pens, and cameras? Shall we drop in at the Walt Disney Studios, which in 1933 will produce twenty-six cartoons, thirteen of which will be Mickey Mouse, and thirteen Silly Symphonies in

. Technicolor? Perhaps you have seen “Babes in the Wood” and “Three Little Pigs” which have just appeared.

The first question that you will ask ...is, Where do you get your stories? Does one man actually furnish all the ideas? The guide will tell you that the Story Department is one of their most important divisions. . . . Here, for example, is a tentative story outline for “Santa’s Workshop”:

... Story opens showing exterior of Santa’s workshop at the North Pole — beautiful scene, snow falling, etc., Santa’s factory buildings.

... This dissolves to the interior of the workshop, showing happy gnomes busily operating the quaint machinery; all gnomes whistle as they work. Show various closeups of individual elves

making toys. Everything is run in the manner of the Ford

factory. ...

| Santa ts the big boss who “okays” all the toys. He is happy and very good natured, and gets a big kick out of the various things the toys do. Santa could teach the dolls to speak and say “mama.” .. . Walt [Disney].

= DALE 1938, 53-54 ,

This Fordist fantasy of production, reproduction, and child-rearing, in which __ Santa Claus isa “big boss” who usurps the mother’s job of teaching her children to say “mama, is a story treatment for Santa’s Workshop, a 1932 Silly Symphony

that was released, as one might expect, shortly before Christmas. The treatment found its way into Edgar Dale’s How to Appreciate Motion Pictures (1938),

a Payne Fund manual for teachers, parents, and children on the finer points of moviegoing. Beyond its obvious interest as an example of Disney's celebration of scientific management in both its production and its public relations, _ the passage offers several insights into the discursive matrix operating around childhood in the 1930s. In the first paragraph, the reader is treated to a catalog

of the company’s output for 1933, a demonstration that even in the midst of the Depression, Disney was highly productive. Given a question to ask her invisible guide (in much the same way the dolls were taught to say “mama”), the

| child is informed that an entire department produces the stories that she sees on the screen. It is collective production in action. Yet when the child reads down to the bottom of the passage, she discovers that the treatmentis “signed” by Walt Disney. Perhaps one man furnishes all the ideas after all, and the story

, department exists merely to make sure that they are realized. Finally, Santa’s “workshop” turns out to be anything but: rather than craftsmen involved in. _ hand manufacture, as the term implies, we find the precursors to the Seven Dwarfs operating automated machinery in a factory. Finally there is Santa, a _ | “big boss” who is good-natured and willing to assist mothers in training their children — supplying wholesome toys and investing them with his inherently _

good nature. / | |

The treatment — provided as an example of upright movie production that yielded films good for children — is richest in its embedded assumptions about how the world properly operates. The passage gives a sense of the significance of metaphors of production and management, not only in the rearing of chil- , dren, but in life in general in the 1920s and 1930s. Ata historical moment when _ the nation’s productive capacities were in question, when the destinies of individuals, families, and communities seemed increasingly linked to an ever more rationalized national economy, productivity and efficiency were often synonymous with right behavior and good citizenship. In the mid-1920s, before the Depression, when the economy wavered between boom and bust, new mass-

production techniques and economies of scale generated an enthusiasm on | the part of producers for industrial efficiency and scientific management, and an anxiety on the part of workers who feared that established hierarchies of _ skilled labor were being replaced by interchangeable, automated piecework. | By the 1930s, the faltering economy began to produce similar anxieties in the

136 * CHAPTERTHREE ~ , |

middle class. This threat helped tarnish the luster of tropes of efficiency and gave rise to transitional discourses that sought to humanize the more mechanistic elements of management-oriented practices in home and in industry.

The enthusiasm for locating and regulating the normal child—and attendant : anxieties around those regimes— that marked child-rearing discourses of the late 1920s and early 1930s were not exceptional; they were part of a larger concern surrounding the development and potential collapse of new systems of production, distribution, and consumption. In a social and cultural milieu in which the immigrant (or the nonwhite in general) was associated with interchangeability and a willingness to undertake degrading and depersonalizing labor, and the “native” American with individualism and upward mobility, the tension resolved as “manage or be managed.” If efficiency was the rule, the question remained whether one would be the object of that managerial gaze, or its subject. In this atmosphere, the white, Protestant, middle-class virtues embodied in the “normal” and “average” American (such as Walt Disney) became boundary markers through which individuals could hope to achieve marginal differentiation in a larger mass society. Disney products provided one avenue through which people could engage in the fetishistic practice of directly absorbing essential Americanism through consumption. While the application of principles of scientific management in the factory was fairly straightforward—a matter of retooling machinery and adjusting worker practices — in society at large the project became more vague and difficult. Ideally, an efficient and well-ordered society would witness a reduction in antisocial and immoral behaviors —less crime and dissipation in its citizens — and an increase in social harmony by way of the common enactment of behavioral norms. This was the hope behind management-oriented child-rearing programs: the policing of potential social problems through the internalization of those norms in regimes of self-regulation. In the logic of scientific management, people who properly regulated their own behaviors in relation to accepted norms increased their odds for personal fulfillment while reducing

the common social burden of external regulation. Efficiency benefited both , the individual and society. This was the theory. How was it to work in practice? Child-rearing manuals and periodicals in the 1920s and early 1930s provided models instilling a normal and regulated American culture in the nursery, and producers such as Disney promised to extend that process through beneficial media consumption, but

participants in the program also needed practical examples of how that cul- | ture was enacted in daily life.’ In the 1920s and 1930s, this requirement found an outlet in sociological surveys that attempted to isolate and catalog typical INMIDDLETOWN *_ 137

American culture and behavior, the most famous being Middletown (1929), by oe ~ Helen and Robert Lynd, and its follow-up volume, Middletown in Transition (1937). Middletown (a chronicle of four years of daily life in Muncie, Indiana) was meant to present a recognizable picture of what it meant to be an average, nor- _ mal American, and what real American culture was. T he Middletown books, as

, well as other popular contemporary tracts on the nature of average American culture and society, then, offer both an image of how social scientists imagined the where, how, and who of Americanness, and a sense of the willingness of _ literate Americans to embrace those parameters. If popular child-rearing texts _

of the period attempted to create regimens for the production of the normal | child — and through that child a regulated American culture —popular socio- | - logical assessments of American culture provided an ideal landscape for that child to inhabit. And if Walt Disney was presented as the archetypal Ameria can, Middletown was the figurative ground upon which he stood, a schematic by which to read the civic and social fabric with which the company asso-

ciated itself through its products and public relations. Where Disney offered

| to resolve the contradictions between the rational and the human, the unique | and the average, Middletown provided a massed performance ofthe working __ out of that resolution, a dioramic exposition of the American heartland that _ had (ostensibly) produced Disney. For in the production of the public persona _ of Walt Disney, it was the landscape of middle America itself that generated

the man? - |

_- Middletown and Middletown in Transition did more than represent an ideal _ American landscape. These two popular sociological texts charted the transformation ofthat culture from its nineteenth-century roots in an individualism

based in agrarian and small industrial practices into a rationalized and increasingly centralized mass culture and society. They detailed both the enthusiasm for and anxieties about this change as they were expressed in the daily lives of , ideally average Americans. Central to that examination were efforts to understand the relationship between economic and cultural life, particularly the in-

, creased role of consumption in the relation between self and society (Lears | 1994, Marchand 1985). With the rise of mass production —and mass culture— oo came the apparent loss of local control over the production of daily necessities, _

| and with it a seeming loss of control over patterns of consumption. Particu- , larly in regard to cultural production and consumption — of entertainment and

, social mores—local meanings and practices were being replaced with mass meanings and practices. As the ability to control the means of producing and reproducing an idealized culture slipped away, the focus on regulating that cul- -

, ture through consumption increased. In short, consumption—especially by _ |

, | [38 * CHAPTER THREE |

children — became seen as a productive act, one that needed constant regulation, in the home and in public life.’ By closely reading the Middletown texts, as well as other popular works that dealt with the question of productive consumption— particularly Lillian Gilbreth’s works on domestic scientific management, such as The Home-Maker and Her Job (1927) and Living with Our Children (1928) — we may chart that transition.

This opens up an examination of how a discourse of productive consumption | , centered on the child and its environment transposed ideas of scientific management created for the industrial workplace onto domestic life.* As in the industrial psychology that Gilbreth practiced before focusing on the home, this discourse of productive consumption centered on the idea of efficiency as a means of reducing wasted effort and increasing individual satisfaction and social harmony (Graham 1997, 1998). Even as the Middletown texts were themselves self-reflexive — revealing an ideal American culture to an American audi-

ence—so was the discourse of efficiently productive consumption: efficient consumers were expected to reflect upon their own consumption and its effect on their individual and social lives, and to eliminate those products and practices that produced or introduced unwanted cultural noise.’ The requirement to consume efficiently and (particularly for children) to consume representations of efficiency created a common ground between the microsocial process of raising children and the macrosocial process of mass-producing America

that Disney offered. |

Finding Middletown Researched between 1920 and 1925 and published in 1929, Middletown (Lynd and Lynd 1929) is widely considered a milestone in American social science: it was the most famous “whole life” study of a community, and, as anthropologist Clark Wissler put it in the book’s forward, the opening of the new field of the “social anthropology of everyday life.” Before the Lynds’ study, “no one had ever subjected an American community to such scrutiny,” Wissler claimed.° Funded by the Institute for Social Research (1sr), the study had its origins in plans by John D. Rockefeller to ease tensions between labor and capital by de-

veloping a national network of Protestant relief organizations (Hoover 1990). As part of that effort, the institute attempted to assay the social and cultural landscape within which that network would take shape. Middletown was just one of the institute’s research projects, but it struck an unexpected chord with a literate American public. When the Isr found the Lynds’ data too diffuse and unfocused and refused to publish their findings, the study ended up with INMIDDLETOWN ¥*_— 139

the popular publisher Harcourt Brace. The book was immediately successful with a popular audience and received front-page reviews in the New York Times and the Herald Tribune (Hoover 1990). In years to come, it would set the standard for studies of communities, so much so that by 1948, in his popular survey of the social sciences, The Proper Study of Mankind (1948), Stuart Chase would

devote an entire chapter to them, boasting, “In my library I have a ‘Middletown’ shelf ofa score of volumes, which I enjoy collecting as others collect ship © models” (141). Among those titles he would list Plainville, USA (Withers 1945); Deep South (A. Davis, B. Gardner, and M. Gardner 1941); Preface to Peasantry (Raper 1936); Arctic Village (Marshall 1936); Small-Town Stuff (Blumenthal 1932); Home Town (S. Anderson 1940); and Yankee City (Warner and Lunt 1941). On the

occasion of the publication of the Lynds’ second volume, Middletown in Transition (1937), Margaret Bourke-White photographed Muncie for Life Magazine

(Hoover 1990).’ oO _

Basing their methodology on recent developments in cultural anthropology, the Lynds assembled a small team of investigators and moved to Muncie, Indiana, in 1920. They depicted the idealized middle-American deni-

zens of Middletown as American “natives,” and the visiting researcher as anthropological other whose alienation provided him with the perspective necessary to interpret local folkways:° Having one’s accustomed ways scrutinized by an outsider may be disconcerting at best. .. . many of us are prone to view the process of evolution

as the ascent from the nasty amoeba to Uncle Frederick. . . . To many of us who might be quite willing to discuss dispassionately the quaintly patterned ways of behaving that make up the customs of uncivilized peoples, it is distinctly distasteful to turn with equal candor to the life of which we are a local ornament. Yet nothing can be more enlightening than to gain precisely that degree of objectivity and perspective with which we view

“savage” peoples. (1929, 4-5) ! |

Like anthropologists in remote tribal lands, the researchers attempted to join in the lifeways of their subjects; they became participant-observers in town life, renting apartments, attending civic functions, interviewing different members of the community. Their goal was “to study synchronously the interwoven trends that are the life ofa small American city” (3). Following W. H. R. Rivers, the Lynds divided these “interwoven trends” into six categories: getting a living, making a home, training the young, leisure activities, religious practices, and community organization. They reviewed the census, town and

| state records, and the records of local colleges, newspapers, and business in-

140 * CHAPTERTHREE ,

ventories. Muncie happily yielded itself up to analysis. City administrators provided data, as did local business people. Housewives supplied information on

magazine subscriptions and domestic practices, and children replied to surveys about a range of topics, from school life, to patriotism, to sexual awakening.’° In the preface to Middletown in Transition (1937), the authors reported that

“Middletown” largely and gladly accepted the Lynds’ interpretation of their lives. The editor of one local paper informed his readers, “If you have not read Middletown, you have not taken proper stock of yourself. . . . Lynd endeavors to take the bunk out of our social conditions, not as meaning [Middletown] but meaning America, and he does it rather thoroughly” (Lynd and Lynd 1937, xi). If the Lynds’ reporting of the town’s reaction was honest, the citizens of Muncie took Middletown as a fair assessment of who they were, not only as locals, but as Americans. Contrasting their study to those that attempted to address a single social problem, or which took up a small social subgroup, the Lynds and their | colleagues delivered to their public an ostensibly complete picture of life in Middletown, one from which those readers could (and did) draw parallels with their own lives. “A typical city, strictly speaking, does not exist,” they claimed, “but the city studied was selected as having many features common to a wide group of communities” (Lynd and Lynd 19209, 3). (They would offer this last disclaimer repeatedly, just as often referring to Middletown as the archetypal American city.) In a neat round of logic, they seemed to suggest that the lives of Middletown residents were applicable to Americans in general because they

lived such generically American lives: , Middletown can be lived and described only because of the presence of large elements of repetition and coherence in the culture. As one moves about the city one encounters in the city government, in the church, the press, and the civic clubs... and about family dinner tables points of view

| so familiar and so commonly taken for granted that they represent the _ intellectual and emotional shorthands of understanding and agreement among a large share of people. . . . Those persons who most nearly exemplify the local stereotypes thrive, are “successful” and “belong”; while

| dropping away behind them are others who embody less adequately the values by which Middletown lives. (Lynd and Lynd 1937, 402)

The ambiguity of this passage typified Middletown’s drift from the specific

to the general, from the local to the national. Were the “points of view” to which the authors referred as so “familiar” and “taken for granted” specific only to the other residents of Middletown, or applicable to anyone participatINMIDDLETOWN *_ I4I

ing in the production of a generic Americanness? On the whole, both volumes suggested the latter: Middletown’s citizens exhibited such uniform behaviors because their lives were largely untouched by the sorts of alternative (that is, “foreign”) versions of life and of culture that they might have encountered in

| a larger metropolis. This made them more easily readable as typically American—both to the researchers and to their readers. Thus, Middletown became __ a sort of manual of Americanness— or a diagnostic gauge of that condition— and those who best typified its local stereotypes (or those who did not conform) could have just as easily resided elsewhere as in Muncie. Although later readers would find in the Lynds’ second volume an implicit critique of the narrowness and repression of Muncie’s social life, the very ambiguity that made

the study seem to its readers so applicable to America as a whole (as either.

critique or celebration) undermined such a reading.” | , Where the study was. not ambiguous, however, was in the construction of its sample — and that construction provides important insights into the assumptions underlying the common understanding of the nature of Americanness in the 1920s and 1930s. The Lynds had chosen Muncie, they claimed, _ because of its “small Negro and foreign-born population,” arguing that “in a difficult study of this sort it seemed a distinct advantage to deal with a homogeneous, native-born population, even though such a population is unusual in an American industrial city.” This allowed them to concentrate, they claimed, on . “cultural change” as it was experienced by a “constant native American stock” interacting with a “changing environment” (Lynd and Lynd 1929, 8). __

In short, they chose Muncie to serve as Middletown because the city was largely white and well segregated (see figure 15). Like the researchers in the Berkeley Growth Study (see chapter 2), the Middletown team focused almost exclusively on the “native” white population of Muncie for its data because that population promised a cleaner sample.’* More than a matter of mere circumstance during the course of the investigation, this was a significant element in the research design, and it carried on into the Lynds’ second volume. Infact,in Middletown in Transition (1937), they emphasized the applicability of their findings to the (white) general public, informing their readers that “the median size of Middletown’s native white ‘private families’ was, in 1930, 3.15 persons, a__

size identical with that of the median native white family of the urban United States” (Lynd and Lynd 1937, 165). In the interim between the first study and the second, Middletown had maintained its integrity as a bellwether of conditions obtaining in America in general—if one understood “America” to carry _ arather specific meaning. And even though this condition of relatively absolute whiteness was “unusual in an American industrial city,” the researchers

142. * CHAPTER THREE >

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mel lk OO bi Y9/// 7 7//|

ee tr~— a The function of culture was more than an academic question. For social crit-

ics concerned about the dangers of mass movements, the new mass society was _ ,

| , a strange and unusual thing: the masses, the product ofan extremely successful, increasingly rationalized postwar economy, were like an irrational beast, subject to the whim of the moment, easy to mobilize but hard to predict.”’ For , the advertising agency trying to ensure a steady customer base for its clients, , or for the researcher trying to understand voting patterns or civic participa- _

, tion, the problem seemed. the same: to what degree, and how, wasthe average _ person susceptible to persuasion? Had the rationalized postwar society given __ birth to an irrational and dangerous animal, the mindless, gullible consumer? _ While most social researchers were ostensibly interested in these questions _ for the strictly academic reason of furthering public knowledge, those in the employ of the persuasive industries were interested in developing mechanisms

. for maximizing control over consumer behavior. This blurring of purpose -_-was a matter of alarm for social critics, from the journalist Vance Packard to William Whyte and C. Wright Mills. What all of these approaches shared, regardless of their intent, was a sense that a singular American mass culture had

arrived and had to be made sense of: it had become too powerful an entity © to be ignored. It became important to describe the historical and social position of that culture, from whence it derived and where it was taking American __

| _ society, in order to properly distinguish between it and an ideal American cul- ture that preceded it. This was an unintended consequence of the progressive _ project: that the unwashed immigrant masses assimilated into the new middle

, class would outnumber their predecessors and would effectively dictate the

direction of middle-class culture and society. | ae a _ With the exception of more radical critiques, such as Mills’s The Power Elite (1957), or Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), or even

, 242 * CHAPTER FOUR , - |

MacDonald’s “A Theory of Mass Culture” (1953), explications of the nature of American middle-class culture were in essence users’ manuals fora new middle

class, and as such, each contained significant discussion of the importance of children in the reproduction of that culture. Earlier depictions of childhood had also stressed the importance of the proper enculturation of children to the well-being of the nation. Yet what was distinct about these works, and the works devoted specifically to child-rearing covered in the next chapter, is that they inflected this concern as a need to achieve a balance between the influences of nature and culture. The child was thus homunculus for the masses, an unstable combination of the human and the animal in need of moderation. Many of these analyses of American character, then, were a means of explaining to a new middle class what its newfound culture was (and was not). This began with a discussion of the relationship between culture and nature. For adherents of the culture-and-personality school, such as Mead, Gorer, or Riesman, the question of the relationship between nature and culture derived from their use of Freud to model the universal motive forces behind cultural _ change. By positing the child as a creature with innate drives and instincts that became legible—both to itself and others—only as it entered into culture, culture-and-personality theorists offered a quasi-Lamarckian solution to the problem of how American culture could be directed without being hijacked by the forces of totalitarian control. Only at the point of the individual child entering into culture could one hope to direct that culture; attempts made at other locations were at best misdirected, and at worst dangerously manipulative. For Whyte or MacDonald, on the other hand, this recourse to nature was part of the problem, an abnegation of the personal responsibility of shaping one’s cultural and social life through individual choice and action. For marketers, Freudian models of infantile development and adult psychology offered new tools in their fight to claim the attention and direct the desires of consumers.”* For industrial human relations experts, psychological testing, psychoanalytic or otherwise, offered an array of methods for determining and adjusting the aptitudes and tendencies of the managerial workforce. Yet regardless of variation, opposition, or agreement, the very circulation of the terms nature and culture in relation to the child made their proper negotiation a matter of popular concern. Yet while sociologists such as Riesman and Whyte were concerned with grand social theory, middle-class parents were worried about practice. The immediate problem was to raise a child who could stand outside of the Social Ethic, of other-directedness, ofa culture of observation arising from an increasingly centralized and rationalized social and economic system, without being AMERICA’S TRUE-LIFE ADVENTURE ¥* 243

cut off from its bounty. The problem for parents, and for the media they used in that process, was to strike that balance between the cultural and the natural that had seemed missing in the previous generation’s management-based _

| child-rearing literatures. = | a The figure of Walter Elias Disney underwent analogous changes at the same

time. Following the war, the public-relations persona ofthe man shifted gradually from that of avuncular Taylorist manager to that ofa senior scientist lead- _ ing an immense research team. At the same time, the company’s output expanded beyond animation to include nature documentaries, travelogues, and ©

a collection of frontier epics that involved the meeting of culture and nature _ at society's furthest boundary. Yet, as before, it would be a mistake to explain this shift solely as the result of adroit market research. The company’s cultural

| currency continued to appreciate because it addressed issues of public signifi, cance, such as the role of science in daily life, or the line between culture and nature. The short, cynical reading of this might be that Disney provided the be-

, nign face science and rationality so desperately needed. A longer view would acknowledge that even as the company moved to claim available discursive ground, it provided a space for a new middle class to work out the important , ideological and ontological problems represented in these manuals.” — Historian of science Gregg Mitman has argued that the True-Life Adventures were “moral tales of the family, the Aesop’s fables of 1950s television

culture," andthatin © . ,

a period when parenthood, domesticity, and traditional gender roles were

. idealized as routes to personal fulfillment, social norms came to be re_ inforced through animal behavior stories. . . . The important point about these 1950s natural history tales was that the natural family was an identifi-

able and universal category throughout the animal kingdom. Thisidealof | universality conformed precisely to the marketing needs of national tele-

__ vision advertisers, who sought to project an image of the white, middle- , class American family audience in which ethnic and class differences were

_ homogenized. (1993, 660) | } , : , While this take on Disney's use of nature documentaries in its 1950s television programs is certainly accurate, it only begins to tell the story of the place of its

representations of nature and science in 1950s popular culture. Long before © the True-Life Adventures came to television, they enjoyed success in theaters. They spoke not just of canniness on the part of television advertisers, but of

| a desire on the part of postwar American audiences to observe and under-

244. * ~ CHAPTER FOUR . |

stand nature. That desire was itself part and parcel of a larger set of anxieties and desires that surrounded observing and being observed and the relationship of nature to culture. The work of Disney’s True-Life Adventures — isolating, revealing, displaying, and explaining nature — was part of the sociocultural landscape of the moment, in which Americans worked to understand the new massive, rationalized, national capitalist system of the postwar United States as a natural landscape, in sharp contradistinction to the artificial landscapes of other nations and societies. The nature film, which celebrated the power of the scientific gaze to explain the seemingly irrational quality of the natural world, also celebrated that irrationality, the “wildness” that gave up information to the scientist without yielding its innate spirit to regulation and domestication. Disney offered one answer to the problem of the proper relationship of nature to culture, ascribing through its narrative voice higher social motives to creatures ostensibly directed only by instinct. By positioning these narratives within a past-is-present/present-is-past frame of eternal natural logic, the company created a virtual evolutionary continuum that began in human prehistory, stretched through the American frontier, and ended in the suburban

, living room (either figuratively in the narrative, or literally on the Tv screen). In Disney’s suburban natural fantasy, the American pioneers who struck the template for the “settling” of the suburbs had their own predecessors in the animals that occupied the landscape before their arrival. In Beaver Valley (1950), for instance, the beaver is depicted as a “homesteader” of a particularly libertarian bent whose enlightened self-interest serves everyone: “The valley’s number one citizen. . . . he builds not in the interest of public welfare, but solely for his own protection.” More than a homesteader, the narrator informs the viewer, “The beaver is a true pioneer. . . . For wherever he fashions his dams, others follow.”

In the trajectory of this narrative, the eventual arrival of human settlers in the landscape was virtually inevitable. They were simply the next wave of pioneers in nature's grand design. The American landscape produced families and stable communities by dint of its very nature. It taught them how to build for their own protection out of necessity. It could even authorize cold-war panoptic practices, as when the animals in Beaver Valley (1950) band together to protect the neighborhood:* Beaver country is fine country . . . settlers are pouring in... and whenever you have a land rush, there’s sure to be at least one unsavory character among them... . Like this coyote who has strayed a long way from his native plains. ... Beaver Valley should be easy pickin’s .. . ! What makes it

AMERICA’S TRUE-LIFE ADVENTURE ¥* 245

hard is the vigilance committee. It seems that a coyote can’t make a move these days . . . without somebody giving the alarm!

Disney’s anthropomorphic landscape wasn’t merely overwritten with human qualities. It discursively (re)generated a naturalized humanity with very specific social relations as a necessary iteration of species interaction within that landscape. Disney’s animals merely clarified a 1950s commonplace that the frontier encounter with nature had infused the development of Euroamerican civilization with a much-needed pragmatism, a distinctly American quality that transformed the immigrant into the native. As Disney described it in its public relations, humans and animals shared the same foibles, the same dramas, the same petty personality traits: “In their tumultuous polygamous herd life, the seals draw their own parallels with elemental human behavior for an amazing amount of suspense, instruction and amusing reflection” (Walt Disney Productions 1948). Disney was merely the go-between. It was the seals who drew the parallels between their lives and basic human behavior, and the audience that would learn and reflect. Yet as this brief quote from Disney’s public relations for Seal Island (1948) indicates, that audience would have help in making sense of the — lessons the seals offered. The following two chapters examine in detail how shifting arguments about the nature of childhood and its relation to media— particularly to television— provided Disney with the discursive matrix within which to market these narratives, and how that marketing in turn stabilized conceptions of childhood circulating in those arguments.

246 * CHAPTERFOUR ,

5 RAISING THE NATURAL CHILD

Mickey Becomes a Man Mickey Mouse, either by name or by image, is better known in more

places on this mud-ball earth than any human being in all history. In their day neither Caesar nor Napoleon were half so widely known. —WALLACE 1949, 21

Shortly after World War II, Walt Disney Productions began releasing press ma-

terial announcing the approach of Mickey Mouse’s twenty-first birthday (in 1949). When Mickey became twenty-one, Disney glibly asked, would he be a man or a mouse? Mickey stood poised at several boundaries. Was he properly animal, or quasi-human? Was he about to become an adult, or perpetually remain a child? Beneath the light-hearted banter, the celebration of Mickey’s pending transformation was an apt metaphor for changes in the popular conception of American child-rearing, which increasingly viewed the transition from childhood to adulthood as the proper domestication of healthy natural impulses into civilized behavior. Yet Mickey’s rite of passage also described the maturation of Walt Disney Productions itself—from a popular animation house to a complex, multifaceted concern that produced and distributed a growing array of products for an international market. “The worlds that Alexander the Great conquered and Julius Caesar ruled,” crowed one journalist, “were nutshell microcosms compared with that over which Mickey holds sway. His sovereignty is all but universal, yet he is as American as Kansas City” (Nugent 1947, 22). Articles celebrating the coming of age of an Imperial Mickey captured this tension, linking it to the United States’ rising status as an international power (and a U.S. concern with an inherent American-ness).

Indeed, the mouse and the country were closely linked. As Disney was quick to remind its public, Mickey had graced the sides of bombers during the war, and his name was a code word on D-Day. Following a standing tradition of associating Disney with America, the company joined in postwar triumphal

| discourse, and journalists passed the material along virtually verbatim, trust- _

world stage: re 7 OS (Nugent 1947, 22) | |

ing, perhaps, in public fascination with the sudden American presence on the

Now he’s Mikki Maus in Russia, Miki Kuchi in Japan, Miguel Ratocinto in | , | Spanish-speaking countries, Michel Souris in France and Topolino in Italy. ,

The sun never set on Mickey Mouse. In Japan he performed as Miki Kuchi, _

, in France he was Michel Souris, in Spain he was Miguel Ratocinto, inItaly _

an he was Topolino. (Wallace 1949, 35) | a ,

By 1930 Mickey Mouse had become as international as chewing gum. From Mexico, where he became known as Miguel Ratocinto, to Italy which called _ him Topolino, and even in Japan, where slant-eyed youngsters talked about “Miki Kuchi,” he became as popular in children’s eyes as the local equivalent

, of Santa Claus. (“Money from Mice” 1950, 88) -Disney’s association with the new national image also had practical roots in the company’s activities in World War II. During the war, the company had made ends meet while its overseas assets were frozen and its film stock rationed , , by doing government work, producing propaganda such as Victory Through Air-

power (1943), training films on the Norden bomb sight, and industrial safety , films (“Money from Mice” 1950; D. Smith 1996). Besides cultivating valuable

contacts in the federal government, this work allowed the corporation to de7 velop a voice of scientific authority that it would deploy in nature films and = educational shorts in the 1950s and to practice combining live andcartoonfoot, age.’ Transitioning from wartime production, the company wisely chose to diversify around strengths that it had developed over the years, and which the ~

public had willingly imputed to the company—a grasp of the natural world _and an ability to translate the complex and the scientific into lay terms. Im-

mediately following the war, the studios made the most of connectionsinthe State Department and produced a series of health-education films for South America (Cartwright and Goldfarb 1994). In the process, it also createdaseries _ of films —such as Saludos Amigos (1943) and The Three Caballeros (1944)—that _

| combined live footage of Latin America with animated characters (particu-. larly the company’s rising star, Donald Duck). Along with its modern minstrel , show, Song of the South (1946), these films met heavy critical resistance for their commingling of live and animated characters, and for, among other things, —

- accertain un-Disneylike salaciousness in Donald’s enthusiasm for live Latinas. As Eric Smoodin (1993) has pointed out, the company found itself discursively _

248 * CHAPTERFIVE ,

policed by its public, told what it was and what it wasn't, what properly counted as “Disney” and what did not.

In essence, as the corporation, its founder, and its products became more clearly associated with American-ness, and as they expanded into other areas

of expertise, they faced a form of semiotic confusion related to debates about whether mass culture and an ideal American culture were synonymous. Mickey’s proliferation and his association with wholesome goodness, which the company had worked so hard to achieve by insinuating Mouse-related products into the mundane practices of American daily life, began to sound a dissonant note with other of the company’s creations. The development of a multiplicity of voices within Disney flowed out of a set of historical circumstances that directed its discursive production, both in its self-representation

and in the content of its products. Making the most of the external (public) components in that process, Disney’s celebration of Mickey’s passage into

adulthood was simultaneously an acknowledgment of his (temporary) demotion: “Some of the heretics at Disney’s will confide that they have more fun working with the duck than with the mouse . . . and hint that the public’s current preference for Donald over Mickey (the Gallup Audience Research Institute puts Donald first, Bugs Bunny second and Mickey third) is a vote for human fallibility” (Nugent 1947, 61). The company spun Mickey’s passage into adulthood as the passing of an era.” Mickey symbolized the discipline and obedience associated with children of the 1930s. Indeed, he had been disciplined as such as early as 1931, when Disney yielded to parents’ requests that the mouse refrain from vices associated with adult behavior (Maltin 1980, 37). Donald Duck was much more the child of the “permissive” postwar era, much more “human,” acting impulsively on his feelings and instincts. Asked in 1949 why the company was making very few Mickey Mouse movies, Disney replied, “Mickey’s decline was due to

his heroic nature. He grew into such a legend that we couldn't gag around with him. He acquired as many taboos as a Western hero—no smoking, no drinking, no violence” (Wallace 1949, 21).*In the same article, a “Disney writer”

completed this thought, explaining that “public idealization has turned him into a Boy Scout. Every time we put him into a trick, a temper, a joke, thousands of people would belabor us with nasty letters.’ That’s what made Donald Duck so easy. He was our outlet” (21). Basically, Walt explained, Mickey had discursively relocated to the suburbs: “The Mouse's private life isn’t especially colorful. He’s never been the type that would go in for swimming pools and night club; more the simple country boy at heart. Lives on a quiet residential street, has occasional dates with his girlfriend, Minnie, doesn’t drink or smoke, RAISING THE NATURAL CHILD * 249

likes the movies and band concerts, things like that” (Walt Disney, quotedin

Nugent 1947, 22). , OS

At the same time that Mickey was making the difficult transition to adulthood, the men and women who had grown up with him were becoming the new mothers and fathers of the postwar Baby Boom. With this new generation of parents came a repudiation of the child-rearing techniques of the 1920s and 1930s in favor of the more “natural” or “child-centered” methods epitomized by the immensely popular work of Dr. Benjamin Spock. Thus, a major shift — in Disney’s production practices and self-representation corresponded with a significant change in the conception of the child in popular and professional discourse. Circulating through both of these discursive realms was a concern about the proper negotiation of the relationship between nature and culture in a rapidly rationalizing American society. In Disney’s public relations during the postwar period, particularly for its True-Life Adventures and television programming, tropes of the family, child-rearing, and their relation to naturalized social relations provided fertile ground for working out anxieties about what constituted a genuine conformity to the dictates of natural impulses. In Disney’s products and public relations, and in child-rearing manuals and periodicals, the child continued to be a locus for invoking anxiety around individual success, reframing that anxiety in terms of the regulation of American culture and society and providing palliatives for its resolution. While ideas about both child-rearing and Disney’s self-representation underwent radical transforma- . tions in the postwar period, the notion of the child as the embodiment of nascent future social and material relations remained a constant and productive location for imaginary interventions into an evolving human civilization represented by American society. The production of a naturalized white, middleclass life as American culture, and of that culture arising from the American landscape, invested in the figure of the child expectations for a more durable

and vital democratic capitalist society. ae

The 1950s: The Decade of the Child | , In 1950, George Hecht, publisher of Parents’ Magagine (as well as Humpty , Dumpty’s, Children’s Digest, Calling All Girls, and Compact: The Teen Digest), declared the 1950s the “Children’s Decade” (Hecht 1950; see figure 25). Statistics were on Hecht’s side: the Baby Boom had been building since 1945 and was considered by many a central fact in American life. In 1940, 2. 5 million children were born in the United States. By 1956, over 4 million children a year were being born, with some optimistic demographers predicting a birth rate

250 * CHAPTER FIVE . oe

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of 6 million a year by 1970 (Gould 1956). Spock’s Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care ([1946 | 1957) was a national best seller, as was David Riesman’s analysis of American culture, The Lonely Crowd, which devoted several chapters

to the central place of children in middle-class life.* For Hecht, as for others, child-rearing was an issue of national infrastructural planning; he equated the need to care for children with building airports and the construction of the interstate highway system. While Hecht’s desire to promote the best interests of children may seem somewhat self-interested, he was not alone. Social commentators concerned with the nation’s future considered an understanding of the increasing centrality of children (particularly middle-class white boys) in social life absolutely necessary to any description of America’s future — regardless of whether they saw this focus on youth as beneficial or detrimental. Yet as the graphic that accompanied Hecht’s essay suggests, by 1950 the importance of child-rearing was no longer limited to safeguarding the future interests of the United States. Godlike parental hands offered the entire world to the aspiring, desiring child: at the dawn of the Atomic Era, the fate of the planet would soon rest in those

small hands. |

RAISING THE NATURAL CHILD +* 251

The postwar boom in births also marked a radical shift in the meaning _

| of childhood and the means by which children were raised (Strathman 1984). The previous generation— many of whom had recently become parents them-

selves—had grown up under a regime of “scientific” child-rearing that had _ imagined the child as a laboratory animal, the parent as a managing techni- | cian in the child’s development, and the home as a domestic laboratory. As a counter to this, new American child-rearing regimes of the 1950s reimagined .

| the child as a higher-order animal that needed to be encouraged to grow in harmony with its aptitudes, an untamed creature whose proper domestica- _

- tion would not only act as a prophylactic against totalitarianism but would | | demonstrate both the evolutionary necessity of American democratic capi| -_talism and the ontological fallacy of Soviet communism. This new child was a significant element ina cold-war project to articulate midcentury Ameri- -

a can nation-building — particularly the rationalization and standardization of

a its infrastructure, educational systems, and economy —as distinct from simi- | lar operations by its ideological opponents, and as capable of producing future

_ generations inherently resistant to the inducements of those opponents, or to any antidemocratic undercurrents in capitalist mass culture. This child had more in common with Donald than with Mickey and was more a creature of

the True-Life Adventures—untamed without being too wild—than of Snow , _—- White or Bambi. The efficiently managed child of the 1920s and 1930s had acted _ asaprophylactic against uncertainty and instability during the Depression; this __

, new natural child would serve a similar function, moderating the conform} ist excesses of postwar American mass culture and society. Ironically, the way to achieve that nonconformity was to help the child conform to its gender— to provide an environment in which it could harmonize its sensual impulses

| with its role in a tightly gendered culture. In the postwar years, child-rearing experts would explain the benefits and pitfalls of leading the natural child to its culturally sanctioned place in life, and Disney’s version of nature would model

| - that place, creating a matrix of both anxiety and its relief that parents would | navigate as they attempted to insure the success and stability of their children, _

and of the nation. Sn | _ Oo .

. Margaret Mead and.the Child as a Cold-War Weapon . _ As the discussion of American character in chapter 4 suggests, the theoretical

_ ss underpinnings for the shift in child-rearing theory and practice in the postwar ~ United States had their roots in wartime concerns about engendering democratic behaviors in children. Following the war, these arguments continued in

252, * =~ CHAPTER FIVE OS ;

the articulation of a cold-war project to demonstrate the superiority of American social organization over that of the Soviet Union, a sort of precursor to the Nixon-Khrushchev “kitchen” debates later in the decade (Tyler May 1988, Marling 1994). The cold war may have been a war of technology and of clientism, but it was also very much an ideological struggle played out in discourses about everyday practices. As she had been during the war, one of the key figures in those discourses was the anthropologist Margaret Mead. A friend and colleague of Benjamin Spock (he filmed the birth of her daughter and was her pediatrician) and associate of child psychoanalyst Erik Erikson, Mead saw in the articulation of a culturally based model of child development a tool for studying the practice of socialization in diverse cultures and a means for refuting the state control of that process by Nazi Germany and, later, the Soviet Union. She would derive that model from Freud and articulate it through the comparative anthropology of her mentors and colleagues, Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict.” The ostensible purpose of this comparative anthropology was to isolate those behaviors and attitudes that were specific to a given culture and those that crossed cultural lines, which therefore could be rightfully called universal human traits.

What makes Mead significant in this instance is that her project involved not only developing a model of enculturation that simultaneously located universal developmental principles and respected a given culture’s practices, but that she also believed that the popularization of that work was necessary to the creation of an informed democratic society. With Coming of Age in Samoa in 1928, Mead began a lifelong project of making anthropological concepts accessible to the American lay middle class, with the express purpose of giving that group a broader perspective on its own life ways and an appreciation of the value of cultural difference.®° This would allow them to see their childrearing practices as cultural responses to the natural process of development. The first step in this project was to alienate that middle class from its own culture by presenting in detail the lifeways of primitive Others and then comparing those lifeways to those of her readers. “We choose primitive groups who have had thousands of years of historical development along completely different lines from our own,” she explained, “. . . whose social organization is not only simpler but very different from our own. From these contrasts, which are vivid enough to startle and enlighten those accustomed to our own way of life and simple enough to be grasped quickly, it is possible to learn many things about the effect of civilisation upon the individuals within it” (Mead 1928, 5). Through popular anthropology, Mead hoped to demonstrate to her American readers the specificity of their own social practices, and the possibility of their RAISING THE NATURAL CHILD * 253

, revision. Here, the implicit assumption was that there were potential—but not ; immutable — similarities and differences between American culture and those — of other nations that could be revealed only by going native and experiencing , firsthand (like any parent) the consonances and dissonances between practices _ , in the everyday life.in radically different social and cultural settings.’ She had

. gone to Samoa, she claimed, to answer the question of whether “the disturbances which vex our adolescents fare] due to the nature of adolescence itself __

or to the civilisation” (6-7). , a ,

This wasn’t merely an academic exercise. Mead’s 1928 text marked an im-

portant moment in the rise of thinking about childhood that ran counter to

, the management-oriented and behaviorist theories then in vogue. Althoughit = } _ would take almost twenty years for this response to achieve widespread popu-

—_ larity, Mead in particular was laying a theoretical and practical groundwork for imagining the child as a primary site wherein a stable human nature could

be separated from a malleable human culture. And although the idea that the child was the proper site for this investigation dated back to the work of — ___ G, Stanley Hall and other turn-of-the-century child researchers, the anthropo- __ logical turn suggested by Mead represents an effort to replace the image of the child as laboratory animal with a more holistic image that required the study

of the child in its own natural environment.’ | , 7

_ By the time she edited Childhood in Contemporary Culture in 1955, Mead would frame the question more specifically, suggesting that “we are coming ©

to a new appreciation of the relationship between ‘culture’ and ‘nature, of the ways in which our systems of learned behavior are safer than a reliance upon -

biological equipment, as well as to an appreciation of the hazard in the denial of the biologically given” (Mead 19554, 451). For Mead, the rejection of behav-

| iorism (and of other management-based approaches to child-rearing) didnot _ require the abandonment of the rigorous study of the child’s development.’ : What had to be lost was the notion of the childasa laboratory animal that could

be exposed to rigidly controlled doses of culture with relatively quantifiable oe results (Mead 1928, 3-4). It wasn’t that management-based methods of childrearing had denied the animal origins of childhood, but that they had imag, ined developing techniques for the management of the child’s environment as a clinical scientific enterprise distinct from its cultural underpinnings (Mead | 1955a, 452-53). In Mead’s view, one had first to develop a historical and cultural , understanding of the meaning of childhood and child-rearing in midcentury

. American society, which could then be mapped against the already consider-

| able and growing body of data about the physiological and psychological deoe velopment of children, American and otherwise, in order to give both develop-

, 254. * CHAPTERFIVE a _ | ,

mental researchers and parents information about the most useful methods of enculturation in those specific circumstances. The parsing of American child development into natural and cultural components required a careful survey of expectations for child-rearing in American culture, the hopes and desires that people brought to the task, which would produce “an adequate patterned representation of what parental ideals would ‘predictably’ be in the middle-class culture of the United States in the mid-twentieth century” (Mead 1955b, 16). An analysis of those often contradictory ideals would eventually reveal a “pattern of culture,” a matrix of expectations that the child confronted as it was taught fundamental tasks such as walking, talking, and controlling its bowels. The image of a universal, natural child entering into midcentury American society was to resolve against the patterns of an identifiable middle-class American culture revealed and understood by anthropological, psychological, and sociological enterprises. The purpose of this imagined project was neither to suggest that white, middle-class American children embodied the universal ideal of the child (although that was an unintended effect) nor to denature American mass culture. Rather, it was meant to suggest to social scientists involved with childhood, child-rearing, and education—and to their popular translators—a program of study and a praxis that could attenuate a tendency to conflate the natural and the cultural inherent in “authoritarian” programs of the past. The child, properly studied and raised in its natural environment, would be a cold-war tool for the promotion of a healthy democratic capitalism, with the power to defuse international hostilities, see past petty nationalisms, and resist psychological persuasion.” The association of stimulus-response conditioning and other rigid child-rearing methods such as schedules for feeding, diaper-changing,

toilet-training, and so on, with the inculcation of mindless obedience and state control of the subconscious suggested unsettling parallels between a rapidly rationalizing United States and its ideological opponents, particularly the Soviet Union and later China. In some cases, such as a 1955 study by Else Frenkel-Brunswick (coauthor with Theodor Adorno of The Authoritarian Personality [1950]) on the relationship of excessive discipline in child-rearing to political consciousness, the correlation was quite literal. “The intimidating, punitive, and paralyzing influence of an overdisciplined, totalitarian home atmosphere may well exert a decisive influence upon the thinking and creativity of the growing child,” she warned her readers (Frenkel-Brunswik 1955, 383). “The impoverishment of imagination seems to be analogous to that apparent under totalitarian social and political regimes.” Simultaneously looking back at the horrors of Nazi Germany and forward RAISING THE NATURAL CHILD * 255

to the specter of totalitarianism lurking in mass culture, researchers such as Frenkel-Brunswik treated child-rearing as an important element in the production of future political formations. The need to understand and regulate childrearing was not simply a matter of faddishness or marketing; it concerned the course of history. For sociologists, anthropologists, and psychologists charting the place of the new middle-class family in rapidly changing national and international social formations, the United States at midcentury -was a focal point for studying and intervening in the social and cultural evolution of the species. As Margaret Mead put it, “The last half-century has been a period of insight into the dynamic processes of growth and character development, into the involvement of the whole organism in any particular activity or expression... . Gradually also our thinking about the way in which character was formed expanded from the immediate influences of parents face to face with an intractable organism, to a realization that these parents were themselves part of larger wholes, which could be analyzed into neighborhoods, communities,

the wider society” (Mead 1955b, 449). ,

_ American society was evolving, learning to regulate its own development. , The downside of this self-referential matrix, though, was that in the rush to correct perceived ills, social theorists could make overly directive suggestions that a society eager for improvement might be inclined to act upon without considering the long-term consequences: “The first response to any of these

new insights is often crude and wholesale. .. . There were even . . . suggestions .. . that, as parental upbringing was obviously the cause of most of the trouble in human character, the less there was of it, the better—a point of © view . . . adopted as a revolutionary tactic in totalitarian countries seeking artificially to hasten the development of a generation with a different character structure” (Mead 1955b, 450- 51). Mead’s ominous reference to the removal of the parent linked Soviet child-rearing practices to just such a suggestion by behaviorist John Watson, who in a popular child-rearing text in 1928 intimated that children were probably better raised by developmental professionals than by parents (Watson 1928). Yet Mead raised a difficult point that had to be faced: in a rapidly changing social structure in which the home appeared to be losing ground in child-rearing, what place would the parent have in the process and

how would she be integrated? More important, perhaps, what was the correct way to intervene in child-rearing in a way that respected the primacy of the parent but protected the larger social good? The truth was that, be they Soviet or American, developmental researchers were interested in bringing about “a generation with a different character structure.” The key distinction was that

256 * CHAPTER FIVE

this process could not be “artificially hastened.” Evolution had to be monitored and directed, but it could not be rushed. What was needed, then, was a way of understanding how culture related to nature, and how one could intervene in that process naturally.” The boundary that Mead and others were to draw made a distinction between impulses to conform to mass authority and a natural desire to belong to a social group. The experts would help teach the parent the difference between the two, and the parent would guide the child. To do so, the parent had to learn

to differentiate between a natural desire to see her child conform based on wishing it properly socialized (able to “get along”), and a desire that was based on an irrational need for obedience. The parent was imagined as the culture’s representative in the home. Although she was to facilitate the child’s encounter with culture rather than micromanage its development, she still had to impart to it some sense of common standards. If the parent understood herself as mediator between the culture at large and the child, rather than as the final arbiter of absolute values, then the possibility that her disciplinary decisions were the result of capriciousness or of defects incurred in her own upbringing might be reduced. Imagining the presence of the community in the acts of child-rearing was meant to both comfort and caution the parent.

Although it was important to show how a child raised “naturally” could be inherently resistant to totalitarianism and authoritarian manipulation, it was also important to demonstrate the unfortunate teleology of Soviet childrearing practices. In “Child-Training Ideals in Soviet Russia” (Mead and Calas 1955), Mead and her Soviet expatriate coauthor painted a picture of Soviet childrearing as a regulated enterprise in which the needs of the family and the individual were subordinated to those of the state, producing creatures who placed the dictates of local and national governments ahead of those of family and parents.’? Inasmuch as the Soviet approach Mead described echoed calls by the previous generation of American child-rearing experts to regulate the production of good citizens, the task of differentiating between American and Soviet methods required the depiction of the former as spontaneous and the latter as overdetermined. “Instead of a series of partially related efforts designed to assist parents, educate teachers, and incorporate new bodies of scientific findings on child development,” Mead and Calas warned, “Soviet laws of learning, child psychiatry, nutrition [and] child rearing may become a conscious instrument of the revolutionary regime” (179). The difference was one of compulsion. According to Mead, the Soviet family was required by the state to follow a coordinated plan for child-rearing. The

RAISING THE NATURAL CHILD ¥* 257

Soviet child was not meant to be a free-thinking and freely acting participant in a democratic state. Describing the attitude of Soviet developmental theorists toward family life, Mead parodied the Party line: “When we realize that children are important because of their future usefulness to the state, then the role of the family as a state agency for the protection of human raw material is clear” (Mead and Calas 1955, 183). Unlike the American family, which was imagined

as a private haven from which economic and governmental regulation were supposedly excluded, the Soviet family was nothing more than a workshop for the production of pliant citizens. Mead suggested that the end product of this type of approach were children who, like the Hitler Youth before them, would report on their own parents if their upbringing diverged from accepted state practice (183). Even after postwar reforms to the Soviet system, she reported, parents were still answerable to their children and to the state for their domestic practices.’ If American families were accountable to the state through the public school system, and to the dictates of a rationalized economy through workplace “human relations,” it was important that the formation of the child represent a point of resistance to the excesses of the rational and that the home

form a boundary between the personal and the collective. The Soviet model respected no such boundary. In this, its purported programs resembled the more extreme citizen-making rhetoric of the American scientific-management model of the 1920s and 1930s, in its calls for engineering social relations. More disturbing, though, was the intended product of this process, which bore a striking resemblance to the worst fears of Riesman and Whyte: the “other-directed” adult who enforced the “social ethic” on its peers. The Soviet parent was responsible for “the task of unremittingly forming the ‘moral countenance’ ofthe child, so that the child will learn to take control over itself and join the group of authorities who help maintain external controls on other people” (Mead and Calas 1955, 186). According to Mead and Calas, the Soviet child was socialized to mistake the ideological seamlessness of Soviet life for a natural system, to assume that the family was simply the most local instantiation of the Soviet government, and that all social life was inherently ideological. In this cautionary tale, the Soviets, historical materialists though they were, had not learned from history. They continued to make the mistake that American practitioners of the 1920s and 1930s had made: they treated child-rearing as a rationalized means of producing (national) citizens. Their approach limited the natural to a set of unconscious mechanical processes — such as reflexes, growth patterns, and behavioral stages— which responded in a predictable fashion to stimuli applied from without. It assumed that culture existed to serve the rational needs of the larger society by converting the

258 * CHAPTER FIVE ,

(mechanistically) natural child into a citizen, and that cultural practices could be regulated in an orderly fashion to meet new social needs. This false sense of nature could lead to an equally false sense of culture, Mead suggested in the conclusion to Childhood in Contemporary Culture, one which actually impeded a people's social evolution by depriving them of a creative role in adjusting their traditions and practices to new ideas about social relations, creating in them a reflexive need to follow the regimens they were given without consideration for whether they were appropriate. In this situation, parents and other caregivers would anxiously respond to direction (governmental or otherwise) by blindly attempting to adjust their previous childrearing techniques to what they perceived as the “one best way” to raise the child. Yet these attempts to ignore or rewrite the relationship between nature and culture represented by the child, which could be facilitated but not programmed, were ultimately ignorant, misdirected, and outside of the general flow of human evolution: “There is, on the whole, less sophistication about the relationship between child-rearing practice and character formation in the published literature of the Soviet Union than there is in the present-day Admiralty Islands, among a people who twenty-five years ago were in the Stone Age” (Mead 1955, 181-82).

. Insharp contrast to the Soviet Child, the American child of the 1950s had the potential to be more natural by virtue of its parents’ willingness to allow it to develop in its own way, and by the family’s collective ability to discern between things natural, cultural, and social. It was the job of theorists and researchers such as Mead to determine where each of these realms began and ended, and to provide that information for popular dissemination. The cold war was more than a struggle between two ideologies (or one ideology and one naturally occurring socioeconomic system); it was figured as a battle for the future viability of the species. Properly reared children were imagined as a potential prophylactic against the prospect of mass conformity and would also serve as a natural buffer against the next generation of Soviets, who were being raised to resist and disrupt the natural course of human evolution.” In “The Coming International Brains Race” (1956), Parents’ publisher George Hecht imagined a Soviet expansion on the order of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Siegel 1956):

Rapidly replacing the present international arms race is an international brains race which the United States is in danger of losing unless we act decisively and promptly. .. . Shortly, if not already, the Soviet Union will have more engineers, doctors, and scientists than it requires, and its surplus supply of such indoctrinated specialists will doubtless be sent to the

RAISING THE NATURAL CHILD ¥* 259

underdeveloped and as yet neutral countries in Southeast Asia, the Middle

Bast, and Africa, where they will be winning friends and influencing people

~ for Communism. (Hecht 1956) a , |

The image of a horde of minions of a Soviet Dale Carnegie fanning out through Africa, Southeast Asia, and South America was meant to inspire _ Americans to properly fund their public schools. At the same time, though, it . linked a need to foster in children an inherent individualism resistant to mass

behavior to the commonly held belief in the need to coordinate a counterhegemonic force against Soviet expansion. In the postcolonial battle for the hearts and minds of the evolutionarily previous, the untutored and childlike postcolonials would be unable to distinguish a Soviet doctor from an Ameri, can one, a helpful U.S. engineer from an equally solicitous Russian one.’ The — paradigms and programs of the latter would lead a people a step furtheralong

, in their social and cultural evolution — simply by dint of allowing them to develop naturally — while the former would inhibit them. Like the people of the Admiralty Islands, they could either advance rapidly from the Stone Age into

the twentieth century or be left worse off than before. , Practically, this move to the natural would entail, toa certain degree, a shift from the clinical to the pediatric and the psychoanalytic —from the child as

a fixed point on a curve of normality, to the child as an individual organism | arising at a unique historical and social moment.’* As an eventual corrective _ to immediate social problems, the child not only acted as the crystallization of a set of historical and spatial conditions, it also located the solutions to those problems in its small (implicitly white and explicitly middle-class) body. The United States could resist totalitarianism not so much by collective political © or economic action, but by eschewing rigid feeding schedules and unmotivated spankings. Though delicate and unreliable, the child was an adjustable homunculus of future social relations. That was the theory: it just required

| some translation. — | ,

Dr. Spock Explains It All a | | | If you are an old reader of this book, you'll see a lot has been addedand changed. ... When I was writing the first edition, between 194 3 and 1946, —

the attitude of a majority of people toward infant feeding, toilet training, , and general child management was still fairly strict and inflexible. However, the need for greater understanding of children and for flexibility

} , , in their care had been made clear by educators, psychoanalysts,and

260 * CHAPTER FIVE a ,

pediatricians, and I was trying to encourage this. Since then a great change in attitude has occurred, and nowadays there seems to be more chance of a conscientious parent’s getting into trouble with permissiveness than with strictness. So I have been trying to give a more balanced view. —SPOCK 1957, |-2

So began the third edition of the immensely popular Common Sense Book of Baby

and Child Care, by Dr. Benjamin Spock. Dr. Spock began publishing advice on child-rearing in the early 1940s, and by the 1950s his name had become synonymous with the topic.” When Baby and Child Care premiered in 1946, it sold 750,000 copies and became only more popular after that.’* Within a relatively

short time, it was known as the child care “bible” and the standard signifier for enlightened parenting. References to it appeared in popular sources, from I Love Lucy to the New Yorker (Maier 1998). Depending on who was speaking it, the name “Spock” signified either the best and most modern approach to child-

rearing, or the most faddish and absurd. Spock and his adherents referred to this approach as “child-centered”; his detractors described it as “permissive,” and the child raised using Spock’s method was often parodied as a petty tyrant whose meek and submissive parents bowed to its every wish (see figure 26). In opening the revised edition, and in apologizing for his past mistakes, Dr. Spock offered a succinct history of recent changes in early-twentiethcentury child care. The child-rearing practices of the 1920s and 1930s had been

built around the rigid principles of behaviorists such as John B. Watson, or around softer versions of child psychology that still advocated the strict management of children along guidelines for the isolation and standardization of norms. Dr. Spock's “child-centered” philosophies favored allowing the child to develop at its own natural pace, letting it lead the process of child-rearing. Instead of regulating the child’s physical, intellectual, and behavioral growth and charting it against established norms, the 1950s parent was to take a more hands-off approach. By allowing the child to develop naturally, observing its behavior rather than directing it, she would eventually be able to read in the child’s actions its latent aptitudes and inclinations and to encourage the child to explore and develop them. The child, learning it inhabited a free environment

within which to explore itself and its world, would be more likely to follow its natural inclinations and less likely to relinquish control over its life to an external authority.” The need to enculturate the child was a given for both generations. Yet the problem with “scientific” child-rearing was that experts and parents had

RAISING THE NATURAL CHILD + 26!

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26. Newsweek’s 1956 cover story on new modes of child-rearing poked fun atthe excessesof. ___ child-centered approaches in both word and image. In these images, stereotypical “permis- — a sive” attitudes were depicted as a form of indulgence unacceptable to adherents of older So

- and stricter modes of discipline. — oo a a rs

_ confused the sociocultural —the tabulation and deployment ofdataaboutthe —

- -child—with the natural (the child’s development itself) and had abused the - _ child’s nature through the rigorous application of that misconception. What _ was needed was a means for giving the 1950s parent the information neces-

Oo sary to discern between nature and culture, and the tools for improving the , _. relationship between the two. Their parents had turned to experts and to. man- —

agement systems, standing between the child and the researcher, acting as middle managers in their children’s upbringing. Rather than managers, 1950s _ parents were to be naturalists, studying their children for clues to theirnatural _ | inclinations and abilities, and for most the primary text for this Operation was

, Avuncular, kind, and folksy, and far more popular than any other author on the subject, Spock sought to allay parents’ fears that they would unwittingly continue the system of regulation and domination that had producedinthem -

_ an excessive degree of conformity. He was to walk parents through the para_ digm shift, encouraging them to trust in nature, and in themselves and their children as natural beings. Spock admonished his readers. (1957, 47): re You may have changed your theories because of something you've studied oe

or read or heard, but when your child does something that would have _ been considered bad in your own childhood, you'll probably find yourself

a becoming more tense, or anxious, or angry than you imagined possible. "This is nothing to be ashamed of. This is the way Nature expectshuman |

| 262 * CHAPTERFIVE = = Oo OS ,

beings to learn child care —from their own childhood. This is how different civilizations have managed to remain stable and carry on their ideals

from generation to generation.

Even as he sought to ease parents’ fears about damaging their children, Spock invoked the responsibility of parent and child alike to carry civilization forward. If anything, the recent course of history had increased that burden. The child of the 1920s had represented a protocitizen, an investment in the nation’s future; by the 1950s, its imaginary mandate had expanded to include the entire globe. As the decade opened, the child represented both a bulwark against impending world catastrophe and the next logical step in the evolution of the species —a fulcrum of anxiety and desire. It was the job of men and women like Benjamin Spock to guide and support parents in a voyage of self-discovery that would lead them to the resources needed to mediate between the forces of nature and culture in their child’s development. With the advent of the atomic bomb, the Soviets’ apparent determination to foment world revolution, and the United States’ increased interests in that same world, nothing less than the future of humanity hung in the balance.” In spite of its revered status, Spock’s text was hardly revolutionary. Like its most direct antecedent, Holt’s The Care and Feeding of Children (1894), most of Baby and Child Care’s six-hundred-odd pages delivered practical pediatric information — particularly on feeding, diapering, toilet training, and develop-

ment— broken down by age and task. Spock differed from Holt, and from many other popular authors in the intervening years, in the inflection of that information. His purpose, he informed young parents, was to correct the damage done by the overly zealous application of strict regulation that had characterized the child-rearing regimes of previous generations. “Strictness was preached and practiced everywhere,” he reminded parents (1957, 52). “Doctors and nurses feared irregular feeding so strongly that they . . . taught mothers that it would lead to spoiling the child. In the general enthusiasm for strictness, mothers were usually advised to ignore their baby except at feeding time. Even kissing was frowned on by a few.” Yet Benjamin Spock was more than just a pediatrician or the creator of the latest fad in child-rearing. He was also a phenomenon of American mass culture. A sort of liberal version of Walt Disney, Spock existed simultaneously

as an author and the embodiment of a set of arguments about the nature

of childhood and of raising children— arguments that were themselves dis- | placed debates about proper social relations in the 1950s. Spock occupied the contradictory positions of a pediatrician attempting to naturalize relations be-

RAISING THE NATURAL CHILD * 263

tween parents and children through a simplified psychoanalytic model; a childrearing expert trying to disabuse parents of the need for experts; anda popular _

, author promoting domestic intimacy via mass culture. As such, he becamethe , focal point for arguments about children as public objects— citizens and con-

| sumers in the making—and childhood as a period ofenculturation. Although Benjamin Spock and Walt Disney eventually occupied very different positions on the political spectrum, in the 1950s both played a significant role—as men

and as symbols— in the formulation and propagation of ideas about the rela- | tionship between nature and culture, and the role of that relationship in the

production of national and international citizens. | Te , However, working out the difference between the natural and the cultural raised an unsettling question: who was to determine which was which? Were —

mutual observation and self-reporting the result of coercive social engineering or merely an expression of midcentury human sociocultural evolution? How was one to determine what was truly natural and what was cultural in human behavior? In sociology, David Riesman attempted to answer these questions by correlating population and economic development. Margaret Mead com-

: , pared child-rearing practices in disparate cultures. Erik Erikson charted the | difficult terrain of infantile sexuality. And Spock (and others) translated this ,

research into practical advice for young parents.” _ — , In short, Spock provided his generation another manual for the middle class, and this one was meant to teach its readers how to act naturally, and how to encourage the natural development of their children. Of course, a parent raising an infant in the 1950S thought little about the proper relationship be-

tween nature and culture, anda great deal more about feeding, diapering, and socializing the child. Child-rearing programs such as Spock’s also served as a membrane between the professional and the popular, translating contempo| rary concerns in psychology, anthropology, and sociology into understandable

domestic practices.” So | . 7 Her Mother’s Child en , a , Among anxious fathers and mothers, the fear that even the most a

innocent appearing act or carelessly spoken word may “harm” the child . or “damage” his future happiness has become a mass phobia. Example: One professional child-care expert suggested that pulling loose a dangling button from a little boy’s coat might rouse “castration fears.” . . . Then, too,

oe there is the character of the educated modern mother. Fascinated by the i ,

(264. * CHAPTER FIVE |

behavior of children, Mrs. Norm, the enquiring type, wants to find out why they act that way. If she can’t get a satisfactory answer to the question, she grows less and less certain about how to raise them. —“BRINGING UP BABY ON BOOKS” 1956, 65

Between its parody of popular Freudian terrors and its caricatured victim of management-oriented child-rearing, Newsweek’s survey of the state of child care circa 1956 accurately (if snidely) depicted middle-class America’s fumbling

grasp on the new regime. Desperate for reliable information, surrounded by dubious “experts,” and educated out of her common sense, the parody of the 1950s mother—like the lemming mother in Disney’s White Wilderness (1958) —was of someone virtually incapacitated by the regime shift.** The childcentered approach replaced a model of child-as-amoeba— responding predictably to regulated external stimuli with one in which the child expressed its nature as raw drives and desires . . . for food, sensual pleasure, and even for sex. Yet if the occasionally incautious or insincere popularizer of Freud frightened a public ill-prepared for the notion of infantile sexuality,” there existed a broad network of researchers who took the idea quite seriously and provided a wealth of material for popular authors such as Spock. One of the most significant figures in the application of Freud to childrearing methodologies was Erik Erikson. A student and analysand of Anna Freud, colleague of Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, and Gregory Bateson, and affiliated for a time with the Institute of Child Welfare at the University of California, Berkeley, Erikson played an important role in the popularization of Freudian psychology in the United States, and more particularly in the project of linking the psychological with the social and cultural via the child.”° Erikson also corresponded with Spock, who arranged a teaching position for him at the University of Pittsburgh after Erikson resigned from the University of California, refusing to sign its McCarthyite loyalty oath.’ In his influential Childhood and Society, Erikson described what he termed a “composite boy,” who, born in the late 1930s, exhibited the baseline American personality:

The family is Anglo-Saxon, mildly Protestant, of the white-collar class. This type of boy is... . shy, especially with women, and emotionally retentive. .. . His mother is somewhat of a “Mom.” She can be harsh, loud-voiced, and punitive. More likely than not she is sexually frigid. His father . . . is shy in his intimate relationships and does not expect to be treated with much consideration at home. Such parents in our case his-

RAISING THE NATURAL CHILD * 265

| tories are still noted down as pathogenic, while it is quite clear that they

| | represent a cultural pattern. (1950, 267) | | , : One component in a broader description of the genealogy of American iden- | tity, this imagined boy embodied the latest in a series of missteps in the evolu-

tion of that identity. The product of a weak or absent father and an overpro- . . tective mother, this 1930s-era composite boy had suffered from his mother’s decision to apply behaviorist child-rearing techniques to her children, which ~

she hoped would lead to “automatic compliance and maximum efficiency, with a minimum of friction.” Erikson considered this method appropriate for dogs, which were “trained to serve and die,” but not for children (269). The purpose of this “mechanical child-rearing” he argued, was to “adjust the human

organism from the very start to clocklike punctuality in order to make ita standardized appendix of the industrial world.” The product of this approach _ followed orders better than he gave them, and the democracy he engendered was one of interest groups and compromise. A bit of a milquetoast, he would be a fine middle manager but a poor executive, and “strangely disinterested in

the running of the nation” (280). | Oe

_ According to Erikson, the American myth of the self:made man (so cru- cial to the rise of Walt Disney), had been reinvented in 1920s and 1930s child, rearing as a form of marginal differentiation. Like Walt Disney, the composite , , boy was expected to mold froma uniformly mundane existence a unique and | superior persona—not in spite of that existence, but because of it. He was ex, pected to perform a uniqueness that pointed back toward regularity, that mimicked brotherhood. This permitted him to shine if he could and to get by if he ©

| couldn’t. The composite boy was the result of a mistaken democratic impulse, , an idea that efficiency delivered the gift of equality. Adopting the techniques of scientific management, “American mothers (especially of the middle class) — found themselves standardizing and overadjusting children who later were ex-

pected to personify that very virile individuality which in the past had been. one of the outstanding characteristics of the American” (Erikson 1950, 253-54). In the end, this composite boy, himself mass-produced, would find a mass-

produced society in which he was encouraged to imagine that his desires were his own, not simply those provided him by the forces of mass persuasion: |

Thus standardized, he found chances, in his later childhood, to develop | autonomy initiative, and industry, with the implied promise that decency | in human relations, skill in technical details, and knowledge of facts would

| permit him freedom of choice in his pursuits, that the identity of free

266 * CHAPTERFIVE | , , oe

choice would balance his self-coercion. As an adolescent and man, how-

ever, he finds himself confronted with superior machines, complicated, incomprehensible, and impersonally dictatorial in their power to standardize his pursuits and tastes. These machines do their powerful best to convert him into a consumer idiot, a fun egotist, and an efficiency slave —and this by offering him what he seems to demand. (Erikson 1950, 281-82) Ultimately, though, the fault for this situation lay not in the conditions of mass society, but in the lack of internal resources the boy had to meet that society — resources that his mother had failed to provide. The solution to this evolutionary deviation, then, was not to be found in a critique of mass culture, nor in a restructuring of industrial relations, as much as it was in the reconfiguration of relations between parent and child. Like David Riesman’s other-directed Americans, the (white), middle-class family that Erikson described—and its “mom” in particular — was the result of a convergence of character traits and complex historical forces. In a chapter in Childhood and Society titled “Reflections on American Identity,” paraphrasing Freud, Erikson depicted the typical American ego as a quasi-natural adaptation to rapidly and violently changing social conditions, standing like “a cautious and sometimes shrewd patrician, not only between the anarchy of primeval instincts and the fury of the archaic conscience, but also between the pressure of upper-class convention and the anarchy of mob spirit” (Erikson 1950, 241). The American ego, nothing less than the representative ego of the mid-twentieth century, was also its bourgeois zeitgeist, the very essence of the middle class (246). This creature, properly tended and defended, was most likely to navigate the social and political extremes of the moment. To best aid this process, Erikson imagined the psychoanalyst, sociologist, and the historian working hand in hand, developing a psychohistorical picture of the progress of American culture to use as a template for understanding the behavior of parent and child, and envisioning potential outcomes for various interventions in those behaviors (250-51).

As the mother was the parent with whom the child had most contact, it was with her that this work was to begin. Erikson devoted a significant portion of Childhood and Society to explaining the psychohistorical roots of “momism” and its place in the ongoing development of an American identity. Momism described the American mother as a domineering, sexually unresponsive narcissist who repressed her children’s sensual and sexual instincts and sacrificed their development as individuals to her need for their attention (249). The con-

cept of momism derived not from clinical observation, but from a work of

RAISING THE NATURAL CHILD * 267

popular fiction, Generation of Vipers (Wylie 1942). A hostile reaction to the increased importance of women in the workforce and in managing the domestic

economy during the Depression and World War II, momism was widely imag- , ined as a psychosocial disease responsible for male homosexuality, neuroses, and aggressive, domineering female children. The fictional “mom” in this supposed complex was a sort of vampire psychically feeding on her own children, recreating herself in her daughters and creating future submissive husbands in

| hersons. _ Be - , For Erikson, though, this largely literary creation described a culturaland

| historical reality. “Mom” wasn’t located in any one individual, yet she existed | as an archetype present to some degree in every American woman (Erikson . 1950, 248-49). He argued that modern American motherhood derived from so- :

cial, cultural, and historical circumstances that dated back first to the Puritans | and later to the American frontier, and which had originally served the positive function of constraining sexual excess in a society whose limited membership required circumspection for the sake of harmony (251-52). The mother in this ,

society was required to entrain and enforce this repression in her children. | _ As American society grew, the mother became the symbol of proper public decorum and repression: “mom” was the Public Mother, the visible feminine social conscience that would, by the end of the nineteenth century, become

the commonplace image of the progressive reformer. _ | : a As Euroamericans began pushing westward out of New England, they cre, ated a perpetual frontier into which the children of this proto-“mom” fled in search of social and sensual freedom. As each successive frontier settled, however, women arrived and served as the contradictory objects of intense sexual —

desire and as representatives of the repressive culture that men had just escaped. Converting desire into repression, these women became mothers who © _ exerted a control over their sons that they could not exert over their husbands _ (250-51). And so on. Since the frontier father was perpetually absent, Erikson

suggested, the mother was forcedto usurp hisroleinthefamilyandtodemand her children’s undivided attention, for their own good: “Momism is only diss placed paternalism. ... The post-revolutionary descendants of the Founding _ Fathers forced their women to be mothers and fathers, while they continued |

to cultivate the role of freeborn sons” (254). | OO a | a In this psychohistorical frontier fantasy, the father’s absence from the Oedipal triangle created an unwholesome tension between mother and son in which her unspent libidinal energy found its outlet in excessively regulating

| , him. Lacking a strong masculine role model with whom to identify andagainst

268 + CHAPTER FIVE a ,

whom to rebel, the son became sullen and resentful— overcompensating for a lack of internalized masculinity with a bluff and bravado that masked a feminized dependency on the mother and a desire for a strong external authority. For the daughter, the absence of a father meant that she lacked a proper object of desire over which she could compete with her mother. As a result, she would become narcissistic and demanding, assuming that she was capable of capturing the attention of anyone she desired, yet unable to believe with any

certainty that she could hold it. In time the son became the Absent Father, fleeing the demands of the “mom” that the daughter had learned to become. The challenge for 1950s parents was to recognize that this frontier dynamic had outlived its psychohistorical usefulness, and that by remaking themselves they

were in a position to reconfigure it. The father had to learn to become a palpable masculine presence in the home, while the mother had to step back and understand that she was no longer solely responsible for the production, regulation, and transmission of culture. And the suburbs became the new frontier where this reconfiguration could take place." Erikson’s composite boy would have reached his twenties by the 1950s. At this age, he would become the 1950s parent whom Erikson believed lacked the balance of individuality and sociability that his children would require to face the demands of the day. Nor was Erikson alone in that sentiment. In “Differential Patterns of Social Outlook and Personality in Family and Children” (1955, 388), by Else Frenkel-Brunswik, a mother hoping to raise her children in a liberal household expressed fears to an investigator that she had been “too much influenced by [the behaviorist] Watson” in her own childhood, and that the experience would inevitably lead her to raise her children under the same model. Based on survey work done in the 1940s by the Institute of Child Welfare at the University of California, Berkeley, on home interviews, and on personality testing, the study attempted “to probe into the underlying patterns of motivation and emotions” in order to determine to what degree parents’ social and political beliefs — as expressed in child-rearing choices— shaped those of their children (371). A boy in Frenkel-Brunswik’s study (“Karl”) who had grown up in an authoritarian home was in many ways the son of Erikson’s composite boy. His parents were depicted as thoughtlessly reproducing the mistakes of the previous generation, demanding blind obedience from their children without regard to their thoughts and feelings. The father had little initiative and the mother was

domineering. Although the couple aspired to the middle class, the fatherapparently lacked the follow-through to succeed. The children, in turn, performed

RAISING THE NATURAL CHILD ¥* 269

a hollow show of obedience to their parents and to external authorities, under

| which the researchers detected undercurrents of anger, hostility, and fear of being punished or ostracized. The child raised in an authoritarian home be-

| came a reflexive conformist at both the conscious and the unconscious level as _ | he compulsively worked to avoid the apparently irrational and equally reflexive regulation of his environment and behavior. “In the context of American cul, , ture, Karl and his family are deviants,” Frenkel-Brunswick warned her readers (1955, 400). “Fat, fearful Karl is certainly the opposite of the ideal American } boy. .. . [and the whole family adheres] rigidly to some absolute status values _ which oversimplify the social and cultural realities of our civilization. This renders them helpless and perverts their view of the social scene, making them , susceptible to totalitarian propaganda.” This rigidly managed family modeled

, social engineering under the pretense of efficiency, the streamlining of human behavior as an outgrowth of modernization. Against this outmoded and antidemocratic force, anew generation of experts in child development, and their

popular counterparts, were frontline agents in a movement to reinsert the | natural and human into the process of producing citizens, helping parents to © _ avoid “the compulsive type of conformity” and to encourage “genuine and

oo constructive conformity” (400).?? BS

“Psychiatric enlightenment as begun to debunk the superstition that to ‘manage a machine you must become a machine,” Erikson argued in 1950 (282- a 83), “and that to raise masters of the machine you must mechanize the impulses of childhood.” New child-rearing experts, he claimed, would plant the

, ~ seeds fora more durable, natural democratic capitalist society, doing work that would be supported by efforts to rewrite the political landscape into which those children would move. Erikson and his colleagues continued the discur-

| _ sive production of the child as homunculus of the future, offering (unwittingly, , perhaps) a means of deferring more concerted social and political action. A signal difference in this new child-homunculus, though, was that, while its pre- ,

decessor had been imagined as a tabula rasa onto which proper social codes — _ could be imprinted, the 1950s version was imagined as a protosocial animal _ , which already contained the necessary information in primitive form. Were it raised naturally, that information would unfold properly; were it raised like a

, machine, that information would be perverted. Yet this did not mean that the - child was free to grow however it wanted. Rather, it was to be guidedinsteadof , managed, a soft hand replacing the hard. Achieving this balance of permission and discipline would prove difficult and produce both anxiety and instruction. _

«270 * »~=CHAPTERFIVE —- | oe } oo

Nature, Not Anarchy The idea has been promoted . . . that, in order to avoid authoritarianism, all authority must be forsworn. Against this excessive view it must be held that total permissiveness would verge upon anarchy. Respect for the

authority of outstanding individuals and institutions is an essential aspect of a healthy home and society. It does not as such lead to total surrender to, or an absolute glorification of, the given authorities. ... Rather than authoritarianism or else anarchy, there must be “guidance,” especially when this is combined with acceptance and thus strengthens the moral functions of the child and helps him to overcome the impulses toward selfishness and aggression. By guidance . . . we mean the encouragement of the child to work out his instinctual problems rather than repress them,

thus avoiding their later break-through.

—FRENKEL-BRUNSWIK 1955, 387 Essential to the process of guided enculturation, through which the child became human, was the idea of learning self-control —the notion that the child first had to learn to recognize its human feelings, and then to control and channel them. Self-control had also been a significant concept in the previous generation’s child-rearing literature, but in the postwar period it underwent an important change. Previously, self-control had been understood as a pattern of responses imprinted on the child through the repetition of proper stimuli, through which external regulation became internalized. By the 1950s, selfcontrol was more often described as deriving from a process in which the child gained control by first developing an understanding of its own feelings, then learning how to express those feelings in a socially acceptable manner. In effect, this model reversed the vector for the development of self-control, imagining it as proceeding from the child’s interior world into the larger social realm. Proper self-control was meant to give the 1930s-era child a competitive edge by providing it with the tools needed to respond independently and correctly to any situation. The 1950s child, however, experienced self-control as engendering a harmonious relationship with its peer group, and success as getting along more than winning. This was the other-directedness about which David Riesman worried, or the Social Ethic that concerned William Whyte, and although the child-centered approach was meant to serve as a corrective to the authoritarian impulse, its detractors saw in it an equal potential for the production of

excessive conformity through slavish attention to group norms. , In the 1950s child-rearing ideal, the proper boundary between the natural RAISING THE NATURAL CHILD ¥* 27!

and the cultural occurred midway between the authoritarian and the anarchic. , A child raised too strictly might become susceptible to arbitrary authority; one raised too laxly would be anarchic and rebellious and might contribute to conditions conducive to revolution. The child whose natural impulses were respected but who experienced sensible restraint would be best prepared for democratic capitalism: able to compete, but mindful of the needs of the larger

| community. Yet for critics of child-centered practices, Spock’s brand of “per_ missiveness” signified a refusal to impart to the child universal and standardized codes of behavior and to give it the necessary tools for its individual agency. The concept was nature run amok, a willingness to allow the child, a precultural being, to dictate the nature of social relations—in the family, and by extension within the larger culture. Within that critique, the blame for the — paradigm’s excesses and failures circulated between Spock, the overzealous

and undereducated parent, and the disobedient child. Indeed, itseemed asif , the laxity of the theory itself made everyone somewhat culpable: “Since 1940, horrible excesses have been committed in the name of [permissiveness]. an There were no difficult children, it seemed, only difficult parents. One ‘prob-

~ lem mother’ complained: “My child won't sleep; he won't eat; he may take what doesn’t belong to him. He tells me he hates me, and he hates his baby

sister, too. He tears up books, messes his food, and kicks his grandmother’ ”

| (“Bringing Up Baby on Books” 1956, 66). , | | This interpretation derived in part from overly enthusiastic readings of | Spock by parents, well-meaning pediatricians, and psychologists, and in part _ from an uneasiness on the part of some social critics toward an approach to child-rearing that seemed designed more to reduce the parent to the child’s - level than to introduce the child to the adult world of self-regulation. The tendency to hold Spock responsible for the excesses of his enthusiasts led him to

| __ offer.a series of disclaimers, including repeated qualifications in the third edi-

| | tion of his book. What mattered more than strictness or permissiveness was _ that the parent’s approach was genuine. “Good hearted parents who aren't | afraid to be firm when it is necessary can get good results with either moderate

strictness or moderate permissiveness,” he counseled. “On the other hand, a | strictness that comes from harsh feelings or a permissiveness that is timid or vacillating can each lead to poor results. The real issue is what spirit the parent

: puts into managing the child and what attitude is engendered in the child as a

result” (1957, 46). a oe - - . Behind the parody of the pampered child lay a real anxiety about how to

_ properly socialize a child without impinging upon its natural aptitudes and de-

sires. The profound desire on the part of parents to do right by their children, _

272 * CHAPTERFIVE | OS a

to offer them a better life, had not disappeared with the modal change in childrearing, nor had the basic rhetorical strategy of child-rearing magazines such as Parents’ in trying to meet that desire. The formula for addressing the practical problems of child-rearing still followed a recognizable pattern: (a) describe the problem, (b) discuss the long-term negative impact—to both the child and society — of not properly addressing said problem, and (c) suggest a means for correcting it. This allowed the parent to identify (with) the problem, to develop anxiety about it, and to find comfort in the solution offered. Even as it involved parents in a matrix of interpretation and consumption that regulated their actions, this strategy —common also to child-rearing texts such as Spock's — still placed primary responsibility or failure of its application squarely on them, particularly on the mother. For adherents of Spock, being “child-centered” didn’t mean allowing the child free rein. Rather, it meant basing one’s actions around one’s child (especially discipline) on a close examination of its behaviors, instead of on a timetable of developmental stimuli.*° While parents of the 1920s and 1930s were expected to compare their child to charts, graphs, and photographs to determine whether it was behaving within acceptable parameters, the naturalistmother of the 1950s was expected to treat each child as a unique case study, a creature bound in its development to its environment and meant to shape that environment even as it was shaped by it. As another child-rearing expert put it, discipline “aims at bringing the child into harmony with the growing demands of his surroundings upon his maturing desires and responsibilities. Permissiveness means accepting . . . the child’s impulses and desires at the moment as the basis for guiding him in his further development” (Gruenberg 1956, 82).

To do this necessitated more than simple measurement and correlation. It also required a language and a set of practices enumerated by Spock and applied to the details of daily living laid out in women’s magazines. In Parents’ Magazine in particular, Spock’s advice was tested in the field, in articles that recounted the experience of new mothers. In large part, they counseled

patient observation. “What comes more slowly, requires more thoughtful understanding, is learning to know the kind of person your baby is,” suggested | Maja Bernath, author of “How Baby Care Has Changed” (1956, 108). A parent gained this knowledge by reading beneath the child’s surface, to the inner drives and instincts that dictated its actions. “With an understanding of your baby’s development,” Bernath counseled, “you'll see all sorts of behavior in clearer focus. You won't try to buck nature, as mothers were in effect instructed to do in the past, when habit ‘training’ and habit ‘breaking’ were the laws of the day” (113).”” RAISING THE NATURAL CHILD ¥* 273

It is difficult, in retrospect, to determine to what degree popular 1950s childrearing literatures were reporting on a change, and to what degree they were creating that change to tap into a booming market. What is certain is that they

outlined a significant shift in child-rearing, reported an overreaction to previous modes of child care, and attempted to illuminate a middle way between

rigid discipline and anarchic “permissiveness.”** Indeed, locating a healthy | middle ground would be one of the major themes in child-rearing throughout the decade. Parents’, for instance, would trade on its former association

, with the masters of discipline, such as John B. Watson, by suggesting that its involvement with discredited methods and practitioners, and its more recent conversion, afforded it a special perspective valuable for avoiding excess. In the magazine’s thirty-year anniversary issue, in October 1956, Sidonie Masters Gruenberg (1956, 47), one of the original members of its advisory board

and long-time president of the Child Study Association, offered an apologia, suggesting that perhaps it was not so much the experts who had erred in» their thinking as overenthusiastic mothers: “Another element in the anti-expert

swing is the fact that in every period of change there are bound to be some excesses. When doctors were advising regularity in a child’s routine, some mothers took the advice too literally and watched the clock instead of the baby. Similarly, when doctors subsequently found that over-rigid schedules are harmful to a child, some mothers went all-out on their own idea of ‘self-

, demand.’ ” 7 a | oe In general, Parents’ anniversary issue was devoted to explaining to parents how they were to make that transition properly. The author of “How Baby Care Has Changed,” for instance, laid out a comparison between two brothers,

one easy going and the other difficult: | ) | Johnny is a lucky boy to be spending his babyhood in the 1950's, instead of the 20’s or early 30s. His brother Jim would have made out all right in those . days —when babies were raised on strict schedules right from the begin-

| ning. The directives set up by authorities were based on physical averages, and by those standards Jim was an average baby. ... A mother was told to fit her baby to the ready-made pattern — never to vary the pattern to fit her _ baby. Hungry at the “wrong” times, slow to adjust to regularity, Johnny would have been miserable, frustrated, rebellious. His perfectly normal individuality would have fought the authoritarian regime — almost cer-

| _ tainly with unhappy effects on his personality. (Bernath 1956, 36) | Jim, the older of the two, fit well within the statistical and behavioral norms being developed in the 1920s and 1930s. Johnny, on the other hand, was just

274. * CHAPTERFIVE a Oo

naturally different. The “authoritarian regime” of management-oriented childrearing (in which Parents’ had a hand) allowed no room for natural difference and would have turned him into a frustrated rebel, a social problem. The parent who thwarted the child’s natural rhythms, acting perhaps on training inherited in the previous generation, who sought tighter control over the child’s environment, ran the risk of stunting the child’s natural development from the animal toward the social. The result was likely to be a child who demonstrated a “discontinuity between the manifest and the latent,” who outwardly seemed willing to submit to authority but inwardly seethed with antisocial anger and resentment apparent perhaps only during personality testing (Frenkel-Brunswik 1955, 397).

Although this rhetoric exaggerated the distance between the previous para-

digm and the new child-centered approach, it signaled the importance imputed to that change in thinking and practice in child-rearing. And though World War II had slowed that shift, the postwar boom was creating a bumper crop of new parents willing to associate the rigors of their own upbringing with their recent experience with fascism and with the rise of Stalinism.” In a 1950 Parents’article titled “Children Need Sensible Parents,” Benjamin Spock claimed: “Twentieth-century America has no stable tradition about how chil-

dren should be reared. In fact, it has a tradition against traditions. Parents in a quandary do not ask themselves what their parents or grandparents would have done under the circumstances. They ask what is the latest theory. Twenty years ago, strictness and regulation were the psychologic and pediatric laws of the land. Now we are in the midst of a strong, even violent, swing in the opposite direction” (Spock 1950, 41). Parents’ sounded this theme repeatedly in the years to come, gently hinting that the mothers of the previous generation, who had been asked to act as middle managers, assistants, and informants in

a national project to standardize child-rearing, had gone too far. In addition, it argued, in overzealously adopting the role of manager, those mothers may have engendered in their daughters an unhealthy need to meddle in their own children’s development, or perhaps a too-violent rejection of the maternal role. Parents’ would act as midwife to the new paradigm —neither fully amateur nor professional — translating the experts’ advice into practical suggestions for

parents, while offering tips on how to undo the advice it had offered to their mothers. What Parents’ cautioned against was not expert opinion, but a parent’s overdependence on that information. The magazine offered to replace expert information with tangible examples and potential solutions, to teach the parent how to translate relatively abstract ideas such as “naturalness” into daily practice. Beginning in the 1940s, the magazine shifted its terms of address RAISING THE NATURAL CHILD ¥* 275

so that it appeared less a journal of expert opinion stated simply, and more a forum where mothers could discuss practical issues around applying the child- _ centered paradigm. Much more than before, it described its female authors as both experts and mothers, adopting a formal scenario in its articles that imagined those mother/experts confronted with a child-rearing problem they came

to understand and solve by grappling with the details ofthe new regime. | To develop this new understanding of her child, the parent would first, of

course, have to overcome the very habit-training that her own parents had inflicted upon her. A woman raised within a stimulus-response model of child-

rearing had to learn the roots and meaning of her response when her child became upset, or angry, or cried for no apparent reason. “We are not to blame

| our distrust of strong feelings. We were raised by a generation whose parents taught them that emotions were not to be displayed in public,” Parents’ counseled gently (Wensberg and Northrop 1955, 41). The magazine suggested that the mother’s impulse to quell a child’s outburst would not only limit her ability to understand the source of that outburst but would also perpetuate an un-

healthy tradition of avoidance and repression. oe Ironically, though, this failure by the parent derived not from some inher- © ent flaw in her character, but from her condition as the adult product of the — previous mode of child-rearing. The assumption was that people raised within the previous regime were damaged goods who had become too dependent on external standards and would either raise their children to be conformists like themselves or— abandoning any attempt to control their children — create anarchists with no sense of proper social behavior. As critics and proponents argued whether “permissive” child-rearing was the solution to the excesses of the previous generation’s parents, Parents’ offered counsel to young postwar parents on how to move beyond the strict regimens of the 1920s and 1930s without ceding responsibility for regulating their children’s behavior: “Many parents .. . can’t say ‘No. The most susceptible are the well-intentioned parents who want so desperately to bring up well-adjusted, useful children. .. . ‘I don’t want to be authoritarian, [a mother] said. ‘T'd like them to develop inner discipline.’ And so would most intelligent parents. But it’s important not to get confused. To gain self-discipline, a child wants to learn how far he can. go” _ (Newman 1950, 2.4). For the 1950s parent, so desperate to do the right thing, for the good of her child and the human race, the challenge was enormous: to shed her “authoritarian” upbringing, to allow her child to express itself naturally,

yet to ensure that her child was not so natural that it was wild. The parent's near-impossible task was to bring her child into culture, but not into the cul- a

276 * CHAPTERFIVE , |

ture from which she derived. This made child-rearing in the 1950s a process of cultural revision in which the parent had as much work to do as the child, and in which she had to learn to let go of the standards and norms which had been so much a part her own upbringing (and which continued to be a part of her child’s experience in school). The child of the 1950s, more than just the gradually resolving embodiment of the future, was also an avenue into and means for correcting the past. If improved self-awareness and a greater sense of inner harmony weren't

adequate inducements to enter into the new regime, parents were also reminded that they were already being watched —by their own children. Moving beyond behaviorism’s theory of stimulus and response, child-centered models posited the infant as an intensely aware and perceptive creature able to read its parents moods from a very young age: “When the baby gets older, he becomes aware of the mother’s facial expressions and of her voice. He will know how to read his mother’s face when she approves or disapproves and will understand what she means whether it is expressed in words, gestures, or facial expression. This will be the case even when the mother consciously tries to suppress her real feelings” (Buxbaum 1951, 52). The problem for the parent wasn’t solved simply by putting on a happy face. The child was a perceptive animal, able to read past her attempts to mask her feelings. The domestic environment — more than a laboratory for raising normal children or a blind from which to observe their behavior—was actually a place in which the child studied the parent as much as the parent studied the child. The parent was both the naturalist observing the child and a significant environmental factor in its development. Like a naturalist, she had to avoid assiduously any act that might startle the child or produce in it unnatural behaviors. Her self-understanding was her contribution to an environment in which the child would inevitably read her behavior as one element in his instinctive drive toward enculturation.

In return, the child provided the parent with an alienated vantage point from which to reconsider her day-to-day behavior. Many of the articles in Parents’ that explored the meaning and purposes of discipline framed the problem with a discussion of the author’s own experience of it as a child. These began

with a confessional in which the author described an incident in which her child acted out and she responded in an excessively violent or angry way. With

the release of that anger, typically, came a memory of her own mother behaving similarly, which then recalled the unpleasant child-rearing techniques , of the previous generation. The 1950s mother/author, who had vowed never to do what had been done to her, began a voyage of self-discovery in which

RAISING THE NATURAL CHILD ¥* 277

she learned to understand her child’s moods and behaviors by looking at her reactions to them and to where those reactions came from. Once she learned to read herself correctly, she would be free to see her child for what it was.2*

In “I Stopped Spanking ... When I Found Out Why I Did It” (P. Meek 1955, 44), a “farm mother” confessed, “As the mother of four children I’ve never

been entirely sure whether I believed in spanking or whether I didn’t. I have had a strong suspicion that there must be wiser ways to discipline a child.” The author’s solution was not to consult child-rearing experts, nor to do as many poor rural mothers had done since the early part of the century and write to the U.S. Children’s Bureau.” Instead, she decided to turn her gaze inward. “I resolved to check myself for a period to figure out just why I spanked,” she wrote, “and to make an honest appraisal of my reasons” (44). That appraisal took the form of careful self-observation while tending to her youngest child. The result of this investigation was not that her son was acting improperly, but that she was projecting her guilt and anger for not paying enough attention to _ the child onto him: “Gradually it dawned on me that actually I had spanked him because . . . I was cross with myself for being so careless” (45). The result: her small son received more love and attention, and discipline that was appropriately motivated, and she gained further insight into her actions and

feelings. |

In another example from the same year, an author offered a more detailed analysis of her behavior around her child, one that had all the markings of the new cultural constellation that so troubled social theorists such as Riesman and Whyte. As a young mother in a newly developed suburb, she found herself in the middle of a panoptic nightmare in which she heard a pack of mothers

braying at their children: “Through the quiet of the morning I was startled

to heara... mother... yelling at the top of her lungs at her child, ‘Come here! Don't talk back to me!’ I had made a mental note to avoid any entangling relations with that woman when I heard another voice from across the street, similar in volume and inflection, scolding another child. Almost before that voice stopped, other mothers joined in the chorus” (M. Peterson 1955, 66). Seeing her own child playing in some mud, she shouted at him —and discovered that her own voice was one of the mob’s. This realization led to an

analysis of the problem, and then to a renewed appreciation for the child as a natural creature, and a greater openness to self-improvement: “A little intro-

| spection revealed that cupboard explorations, wandering from the yard or generally getting in Mother’s way were the most likely to create an unpleasant scene. Actually none of these activities is undesirable behavior in a child who is quite naturally learning about his environment. Was the answer, then, more 278 4+ CHAPTER FIVE

patience? Yes, but more than that. I needed better understanding and a more positive approach to my child, his interests and his activities” (46). For each of these mother/authors, discipline, far from being an unpleasant necessity or simply a parental responsibility, became an opportunity for personal growth, a chance to redress wrongs engendered in an authoritarian past, and to avoid their eventual repetition in the next generation. The suburban frontier was more than a boundary between the urban and the rural or the natural and the cultural; it also represented a temporal boundary between a past in need of redemption and a future in search of perfection. Having gained experience and insight through introspection, the parent’s next task was to turn her gaze back outward, toward her child. A parental advice columnist from the New York Times Magazine urged, “parents must try to understand what a child is trying to say by his behavior” (Barclay 1950, 17). The parent turning to Spock, or to another advisor, was no longer simply looking for reassurance that her child’s behavior was within the normative bounds for

its age. Rather, she was beginning a learning process wherein she would develop a facility for reading the latent meanings inherent in her child’s acts. Even the wordless cries of the smallest infant could be understood by a parent patient and calm enough to listen and observe. As the child grew older, it would give

more elaborate clues, not necessarily via language, but through gestures, its choice of clothing, or even painting: “Far from being the meaningless smears so many grownups see, a youngster’s art is, in a sense, more meaningful than a great many message-bearing adult creations. For what he does is completely spontaneous. . . . [Children] tend to think in pictures. Even adults dream in pictures. This follows the dim dawn pattern of the human species and foreshadows the development of written language” (Deiss 1955, 86; see figure 27). Like the cave paintings of their aboriginal ancestors, children’s paintings described the first attempts to formulate a language from the primal urges and basic instincts from which culture would flow over time. Every child was anew beginning to history, and the mistakes of the previous generation didn’t need to be passed on to (and through) it, if the parent were careful and read closely the signs being offered. Nor was it only artwork that offered insights into the child’s emerging psyche. Consumable items— clothing, toys, books, movies, games, and so on— formed the environment in which the child developed. While the importance of consumption habits had not lessened (and had in fact increased), the meaning of the environment constituted in that consumption did change. Previously, the environment had primarily been a stimulus — positive or negative — that would affect the developing child and play a significant role in its eventual RAISING THE NATURAL CHILD ¥* 279

success or failure as an adult. In the postwar period, the child ceased to be a monadic creature consuming alone, and the environment became a richer semiotic tapestry, loaded with information that affected not only the child, but its parents as well. Parents read their children, children read their parents; parents learned from their children to read themselves, and children learned , from their parents to read themselves and others. In what was essentially an annotated toy catalog in Parents’ (see figure 28), Roma Gans (1955, 46-48), a professor at Teachers’ College, Columbia University, advised parents that “play helps youngsters be part of the group . . . teaches teamwork .. . [and] provides a chance to test out ideas. There is learning —actual knowledge — that _ youngsters acquire through play.” Through play, toys, and consumption, children could locate their natural aptitudes, begin to determine their course in

life, and practice social behaviors. re , Toys and play also provided an important vehicle for the parent’s and the child’s developing observational skills. A parent could gain important insight

| into her child’s aptitudes and preferences and, by surrounding the child with well-chosen toys, could improve the child’s chances for selfknowledge by providing a rich environment from which the child could choose those thingsthat best suited its latent self: “Certain toys have special vocational significance: By _ choosing them wisely you can see to it that your child’s play has an impor- _ tant role in this enlightening process you have initiated. Material provided by Parents’ Magazine, publications by the Toy Guidance Council, schoolteachers

and often those in charge of toy departments or toy store can advise you in your selection” (Davenel 1956, 49). The properly constituted play environment, _ the author argued, revealed the child to itself, doing naturally for the childthe _

work that the various aptitude and personality tests it would take in school would do for its teachers and employers. In this light, toys and play became a form of home testing by which parents could “measure, evaluate and rate _ [personality] against job requirements” so that the child could “get specialized knowledge about himself” to increase “his” odds of “getting a better job and succeeding in it” (Davenel 1956, 11). As the child emerged from the haze of its prehistorical infancy, it made its way along a predetermined evolutionary arc that, if it were properly guided, would end at the job and social role that were

a natural extension of that development. = SO _ Although both parent and child were meant to benefit from child-centered

child-rearing, the child provided the possibility of that therapeutic orremedial action. As a creature entering into culture from nature, the child presented nature to the parent, even as the parent represented culture to the child. Research-

ers such as Mead or Erikson, and popular translators such as Spock or Edith

280 * CHAPTER FIVE ,

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experience and a historical event. The parent wasn’t merely witnessing the child’s emergence from nature into culture; she was viewing the onward march of human evolution. “He’s repeating the whole history of the human race,” Benjamin Spock reminded parents (1957, 223-24). “ You may think of it as ‘learning tricks.’ But it’s really more complicated and full of meaning than that. Each child as he develops is retracing the whole history of mankind, physically and

spiritually, step by step.”

In passages such as these, child-rearing experts were at cross-purposes. They professed to want to ease the tension and worry surrounding child-rearing, to

reduce the attendant anxieties that they feared might warp the child. At the same time, however, they often felt it necessary to impress upon the parent the absolute importance of proper child-rearing to the future of the species. It was like the classic movie scenario in which one criminal whispers to another to “act natural” to avoid being caught. It had been difficult enough, in the previous generation, when parents were warned that their home, voice, and manner could affect the child (and the nation) for better or worse. Now, parents were being told that it wasn’t simply a matter of proper behavior on their part, but natural behavior —and that the fate of the whole world hung in the balance. As David Riesman (1950, 51) put it in a comment on “permissive”

child-rearing: ,

In their uneasiness as to how to bring up children [parents] turn increasingly to books, magazines, government pamphlets, and radio programs. These tell the already anxious mother to accept her children. She learns that there are no problem children, only problem parents; and she learns to look into her own psyche whenever she is moved to deny the children anything, including an uninterrupted flow of affection. ... And while these tutors also tell the mother to “relax” and to “enjoy her children,” even this becomes an additional injunction to be anxiously followed. Ultimately, the invocation of an evolutionary imperative was one element in a push to locate a viable rationale for social control clearly distinguishable from more “authoritarian” approaches. The perceived need to direct practices of introspection, retrospection, and mutual observation operated in tension with a fear of inculcating middle-class parents (and by extension, their children) into regimes of mass specularity that pretended at cultural evolution but were actually socially, politically, and culturally regressive. At the level of the individual (child), the group, and the species, the discursive and practical move to the natural suggested an extracultural logic relatively immune to

284 * CHAPTERFIVE

quasi-historical forces such as communism. In the cultural-historical moment in which the American middle class was asked to imagine itself in the 1950s, the nature made manifest in American culture represented the forward edge of the evolution of the species as a whole.** Here, the True-Life Adventures offered a mass-mediated product through which the child could consume representations of natural gender roles, and which parents could also view for clues on how to observe natural behaviors without interfering with them.

Disney’s Natural Gender In its True-Life Adventures, Disney represented a prehistory that had determined the shape of human history and delivered to Americans a means by which they could read the natural world around them to better understand their own social relations. Although Disney’s nature documentaries subsumed the class and racial dynamics so present in its animated features under the sign of nature, the gendering of its animal world was central to its storytelling process, both on the screen and off.*” Like the child-rearing literature of the day, from Erikson to Spock, the illumination ofnatural gender roles played a significant part in each Disney nature film, as well as in its public relations. Like their suburban human counterparts, Disney’s animals entered into good-natured and innocent romantic play almost from birth, frolicking suggestively before settling down to a preordained domesticity. For example, describing the behav-

ior of young female seals, the narrator of Seal Island (1948) jovially speculated that “perhaps they're just playing ‘hard to get’—taking their time —looking over the prospects, having a final fling of single blessedness. Eventually, however... they must make their choice, for better or for worse.” One can almost imagine the young girl seals at the malt shoppe, idly swinging their saddle-shoed flippers and sizing up their prospects. Once the female seals “married,” the film explained, they entered into polygamous arrangements that Disney called “harems.” Although the term suggested a certain exoticism, Disney contained it by representing that polygamy as a sort of plural monogamy in which the female seals behaved like ordinary suburban American housewives who just happened to share a husband. After marriage, the female seals would settle into normal female pursuits, such as jockeying for superior status and badgering their complacent “husbands” to take a more active role in child care. The narrative carefully managed difference and similarity, assigning an exoticism to those terms that could not easily be incorporated into American life and describing those that could in terms more

RAISING THE NATURAL CHILD * 285

mundane. Disney’s press-release description of the seals’ annual mating on.an

_ island above the Arctic Circle neatly captured this delicate balance while val-

| orizing its own work in capturing the spectacle: “The patient cameras were trained on this great rendezvous for three months to capture the animals in| | live action —their swift courtship, plural mating, fierce jealous battles, rearing of cute youngsters, playful antics of the brides and young mothers, and the © | final balm of instincts satisfied” (Walt Disney Productions 1948). _ a As much as Disney’s management of gender identities and relations was

_ apparent in more commonplace domestic narratives such as that of the kan- , garoo rat (see chapter 4), the company’s performance of mastery over gender | | was most evident in its willingness to incorporate the seeming exceptions, to turn what seemed to be an unflinching eye toward apparent anomalies,andto discursively constrain them, as in this public-relations promotion for Secrets of Life (1956): “The story shows that the Stickleback fish is the counterpart of all

, henpecked human males. He not only has to lure a reluctant bride to his house, but also has to perform all parental duties in caring for his numerous offsprings [sic] before they follow their vagrant mother out among the other loose ladies of the swamp” (Walt Disney Productions 1956b). Deploying a charming verbal reversal (a “henpecked” fish), Disney coyly policed masculinity and femininity

_ in both humans and nonhumans by suggesting that in this instance, males _ who were in charge of child-rearing weren't truly masculine, and women who

abrogated that responsibility weren't truly feminine. , That didn’t mean, however, that the father was absent from child-rearing. In 1953, alongside The Living Desert, Walt Disney published an article in Ameri-

can Magazine, “What I’ve Learned from the Animals.” Yet this piece — which ~ laid out the parallels between animal and human behaviors— was preceded , by another piece that Walt Disney ostensibly wrote for Parents’ Magagine in , | 1949, “What I Know about Girls” (Disney and Alvin 1949). Even then the natu- | ralist expert, Disney revealed to his audience that his knowledge about girls

came from close observation during the performance of his fatherly. duties: “What I know about women I learned in no small degree from a close family ©

life together,” he confided. “As I look back on my life with Mrs. Disney before the girls came, and since, the thing that stands out is the fact that it’s been a lot

of fun. I think that’s because we've tried to get along witha minimum ofrules” (78). Echoing the guidelines for his “naturalist-cameramen,” Disney advocated , a hands-off approach to child-rearing and performed for his readers the model _ behavior of a parent who did his best to allow his children to discover in themselves and their environment (rather than in arbitrary and excessive external ;

| 286 * CHAPTERFIVE | ,

rules) models for proper comportment: “One of the most serious problems I find confronts parents is how to make children obey. For some reason this has never been much of a problem around our home. Maybe it’s because we started very early to have the girls do things through a sense of fair play, rather than responsibility to parents or fear of them” (ibid). Yet as in the dens and burrows of his nature documentaries (and in popular child-rearing texts of the day), the process of natural child-rearing included the inevitable process of gendering as the young moved from childhood into adolescence. Confronted by his daughters’ emerging feminine sexuality, Walt

reacted with the detached amusement of a naturalist rather than the anger and dismay of a threatened patriarch. Disney learned by observing his wife and daughters that, whatever outward show they might affect, women’s nature was far from gentle and retiring—at least when the search for a proper mate was on. “I never knew females could be so aggressive and predatory!” the astonished Walt informed Parents’ readers as he recounted his daughters’ discussions of prospective beaux (Disney and Alvin 1949, 22). Four years and several True-Life Adventures later, in “What I’ve Learned from the Animals,”

Disney would complete the cycle by explaining the nature of mating to his daughter, Diane. When she complained to him about the sexual inequality of the polygamous mating habits of the seals he had depicted in Seal Island (1948), he gently replied: “This is sometimes Nature’s way in the animal kingdom and among primitive people, although it may seem cruel and even immoral to us. Since only the biggest and strongest bull seals are able to win mates, this means that only the best of the race breeds. Nature considers the race rather than the individual in the battle for survival” (Disney 1953, 108). Higher-order animals (such as the Disney daughters) or lower-order animals (such as seals and primitives) all obeyed the same laws, and all ultimately served their respective race. When one stripped away the extraneous layers of culture and peered through civilization, one found the common behaviors of which properly regulated culture was simply an elaboration. In its products, Disney provided the map for reading the natural landscape over which culture was written, and in its public

relations it provided directions for reading the map. The nature Disney provided was “red in tooth and claw” — representing lite, death, and procreation as an eternal struggle — but far from anarchic. This was nature that was wild and impulsive, but which always ultimately yielded to the dictates of evolutionarily imperatives, particularly around the natural ordering of gender.

RAISING THE NATURAL CHILD ¥* 287

Gender and Natural Conformity } Before a child can begin to develop much self-control, he must first — , accept and understand his natural human feelings. As a parent you |

can help him to do this. / | , __LWENSBERG AND NORTHROP 1955, 41 , a oe This brief passage from “Children Need to Understand Their Feelings,” a howto article on discipline in Parents’ Magazine, frames a set of assumptions about the relationship between the parent and child and the natural origin of human feelings and actions. In a rhetoric typical for the period, the authors suggested _ that the child could best learn to control its behavior if it were taught that its _ feelings were a natural response to its situation and that it ‘was to control its — expression of those feelings, not the feelings themselves. The parent was not expected to instruct the child in understanding its feelings as natural, but to. guide; her role had shifted from manager to facilitator. In its cover story onnew regimes in child-rearing in May of 1956, Newsweek offered a succinct history of this shift and described a troubled power relationship between child-rearing experts and parents: “The new Freudians charged that the old-fashioned, straitjacket type of upbringing was turning out neurotics. Discipline of this nature, © they said, tended to ‘scar the child’s psyche.’ By 1935, child experts were demanding a more relaxed form of training called ‘permissiveness’ [and urging] | that the child should be ‘understood’ rather than ‘managed’” (“Bringing Up Baby on Books” 1956, 66). Newsweek’s reference to “new Freudians” was an | unusually direct nod to the theoretical underpinnings of child-centered dis-

courses. Popular proponents of the child-centered approach, though the prin-ciples they espoused were clearly Freudian, rarely described specifically Freud-

ian concepts such as penis envy, the Oedipus complex, and the like by name, | referring instead to expressions of the child’s natural development as asensual _ creature.** As muchas they might have indicated otherwise, it wasn’t that these | “new Freudians” had suddenly inserted the natural into a previously sterile child-rearing discourse, but that they had radically altered the meaning of “na~ ture” in that matrix. Management-based theories had imagined the infant and | young child as essentially neuter beings that expressed an inherent nature in predictable responses to external stimuli, developing gendered behaviors only _ later in their socialization. In the child-centered model, the infant was gen--

dered from birth, and its proper development depended on its parents’ ability | to guide it to a harmonious relationship between its biological sex and its cor-

responding social role.?? | a | 288 * CHAPTER FIVE

Child-centered discourses directed parents’ attention to nature as it became manifest in the child’s body and in its interaction with the world through that body. As Anna Freud put it in her introduction to Edith Buxbaum’s Your Child Makes Sense (1951):

Childhood is not a period of undisturbed growth and development, lived in an atmosphere of happy, care-free unconcern. On the contrary: from birth onwards, children feel the pressure of urgent body needs and powerful instinctive urges (such as hunger, sex, aggression) which clamor for satisfaction. Soon afterwards, the child encounters the demands of restraint, and the prohibitions on unlimited wish-fulfillment, which come from parents whose task it is to turn their children from unrestrained, greedy and cruel little savages into well-behaved, socially adapted, civilised beings. (Buxbaum 1951, vii)

Freud recast the Victorian sentimental image of childhood prelapsarian innocence as a primeval scene in which the child was wracked by drives so powerful that it could scarcely contain them. As the child went through the necessary and painful process of becoming civilized, its parents took on the role of colonial administrators in a domestic recapitulation of the white man’s burden, guiding the child toward the light. While Freud’s version of events was perhaps a bit harsher than most, it captured the notion of the child as a human animal entering into an evolving process of enculturation. By the 1950s, this idea had become a commonplace in discussions of everything from playground fights to dreams, as in “When Children Have Bad Dreams,” from the April 1950 Parents’ Magazine:

Generally, animals, wild beasts and nature in the raw play predominant parts in their dreams. There is a certain primitive quality in the child’s dreams which is lost later in life. .. . Some believe that it is the child’s unconscious memory of life in the jungle, of man’s struggle with primitive beasts which is relieved in these dreams. In his sleep the child recreates a state which existed for his forefathers; he fights their battles, shares their adventures. As he grows up he sheds these memories and loses them completely along with other primitive traits. (Thrope 1950, 38) As the child crept out of the jungle of infancy, it had to encounter an orderly and sensible civilization, one in which the proper avenues for channeling its natural impulses were clear. According to an article in the June 1950 Parents’, gender was key to this encounter. “Children growing up under feminine domination are often unable to feel as kindly toward the female sex as they should,” RAISING THE NATURAL CHILD * 289

one author warned (English 1950,86). “This makes boys too passive when they grow up or unconsciously hostile toward their wives. . . . It makes girls too -

, aggressive and keeps them in continual protest against their feminine role.” In the anecdotal and prescriptive form of popular child-rearing discourse, __ however, articles such as this did not try to explain the political and economic _ | forces, the psychohistorical roots, or the Oedipal complications behind the problem of the father’s absence from an increasingly gendered household.*° Rather, they sought to outline for the father (or the mother reading to the father) methods for performing a form of masculinity readable by his children in the short space of family time allotted him on evenings and weekends. In the , increasingly complex depiction of the significance of the parent-child relationship in the child’s development, the interplay of latent and manifest elements suggested not only that parents could read the child’s physical activities for the root expressions of its emerging character, but that children read their parents’ bodies for conscious and unconscious clues as to how they were to perform their own genders. The world imagined in the 1950s neo-Freudian cosmology

"was intensely panoptic, a feedback circuit in which the interplay between the © , biological and the cultural produced social meanings and practices with consequences that extended through the domestic and immediate to the national

| and international. | —— , — , oe | The important distinction in this regime was between a performed but unconvincing masculinity or femininity and a genuine, natural gender performance. Like the idea of “genuine conformity,” a natural gender occurred in a child when its biological sex, its ego, and its social role were all properly inte-

| grated (Erikson 1950, 30 ~32). In unintegrated children like Frenkel-Brunswik’s | Karl, excessive expressions of masculinity, such as uncontained aggression or precocious desire, were considered to mask a latent feminine passivity, an unease with one’s gender expressed as an “overcompensation” in the opposite _

direction. : , ee

At the level of popular advice, these imperatives translated into a simple | primer in Oedipal conflict resolution in which parents were taught to under- _

7 stand their children as natural creatures entering into a gendered culture, to. , see their children’s experience of desire and identification as natural, and to present themselves to their children for reading. “A boy needs a friendly, ac-

cepting father,” Dr. Spock cautioned parents (1957, 314-15). oe } A boy doesn’t grow spiritually to be a man just because he’s born witha _

male body. The thing that makes him feel and act like a manis being able to... pattern himself after... men and older boys with whom he feels

290 * CHAPTERFIVE | ,

friendly. He can’t pattern himself after a person unless he feels that this person likes him and approves of him. If a father is always impatient or irritated with him, the boy is likely to feel uncomfortable not only when he’s around his father but when he’s around other men and boys, too. He is apt to draw closer to his mother and take on her manners and interests. Of course, a father who chummed around with his son was expected to evince a very different set of behaviors with his daughter: [A girl] doesn’t exactly pattern herself after [her father], but she gains confidence in herself as a girl and a woman from feeling his approval. . . . like complimenting her on her dress, or hair-do, or the cookies she’s made. When she is older, he can show her that he’s interested in her opinions and let her in on some of his. . . . By learning to enjoy the qualities in her father that are particularly masculine, a girl is getting ready for her adult life in a world that is half made up of men. The way she makes friendships with boys and men later, the kind of man she eventually falls in love with, the kind of married life she makes, are all influenced strongly by the kind of relationship she has had with her father. As one might expect, less space was spent directing mothers in how to perform their gender for their children. (Some of the most extensive comments come in Spock’s advice to mothers [357-61] on how to negotiate Oedipal desire and hostility.) If gender as a problem in 1950s discourses centered on the lack of contact with a healthy masculinity and the overexposure of children to femininity, none of the literature surveyed suggested absenting the mother from the home more often, through, for instance, employment or civic work— or collective child-rearing — as a means of redressing that imbalance. Beyond performing his or her gender properly for the child, a parent was expected to have some awareness of how the child might be experiencing its own body at a given moment—that is, orally, anally, genitally, and so on—

and to properly facilitate that understanding. A parent had to understand that from infancy the child related to itself sensually, and she had to avoid fostering repression that could create negative associations. A child improperly fed or weaned in its oral stage might well experience this as a trauma that could reassert itself later in life as withdrawal or an inability to speak (Erikson 1950, 70). A child too rigidly and strictly toilet-trained might feel a loss of free will that would later impinge upon its ability to act democratically (270). The parent, of course, didn’t need to understand the minutiae of oral-incorporative or anal-expulsive economies, but she was expected to follow the suggestion not

RAISING THE NATURAL CHILD * 291

to meddle too much in the child’s interaction with the world via its various orifices. The parent was to observe —both herself and her child—but to intercede only as circumstances required. Any effort to impose her will, above and beyond the standards of her community, was likely to be an act of repression counter to the general trend of human evolution culminating in the middleAmerican ego. This regulation of gendering formed one response to concerns that relying too much on nature in the child’s upbringing might lead to anarchic outcomes in character formation in which the child so escaped the bounds of cultural norms that it produced in itself an anarchic discontinuity disruptive to the harmonious historical evolution of the species (Frenkel-Brunswik 1955, 387). A normativity deriving not from the willful imposition of neurological, physiological, or behavioral data on the child, but from guiding the child's natural, biological response to its gender, had the advantage of seeming to free the child to vary the expression of that gender through its particular interests and aptitudes.** For boys, this meant encouraging the development of latent apti~ tudes that would turn into careers; for girls, it meant accommodating those aptitudes to the ultimate task of child-rearing and fending off the “feminine protest” that signaled a refusal to accept the natural correlation between biological function and social role.” For example, the September 1956 issue of Parents’ ran two interlocking articles, titled “A Mother of Girls Says: Raise Your Boy to Be a Husband” (Denny 1956), and “A Mother of Boys Says: Raise Your Girl to Be a Wife” (Fos-

ter 1956), in which the two authors translated Spock’s admonitions into more concrete concerns. “The mothers of girl children seem to be more matrimonyminded for them than the mothers of boys,” declared the “mother of boys” (43). “This is only natural. For much as our society has changed in the past fifty years, one thing remains the same. The criterion for success for the female, as

: for the Mountie, is whether she gets her man. Careers for women have merely been added to that goal. For a woman, they are ‘something extra,’ not a substitute for marriage.” ' As much as one might hope that the “mother of girls” would have raised an objection to this rather deterministic depiction of female destiny, she was inclined to agree, albeit with a reservation, complaining that “if you have ason around the house, one who can’t take it, can’t face it, can’t share it, can't give, can’t bend .. . keep him away from my girls! If he’s accustomed to coming home to cry on Mama’s shoulder, let Mama get herself a waterproof cape. ... My girls want to keep their shoulders free for burping babies. Besides, they

292 * CHAPTER FIVE

may want to cry on his shoulder, and someone has to be watching the road” (Denny 1956, 44).

The articles repeated, in simple terms, the potential for a multigenerational pathology laid out by Erikson and Frenkel-Brunswik: the son of a domineering or overly permissive mother would present an unacceptable weakness that - would threaten the procreative process for which women were designed, and would be unable to properly direct the course of their married life. Echoing Spock, the “mother of boys” warned that similar problems would arise in a daughter not properly gendered by her father: Your daughter is born a female, but she has to learn how to be feminine. And that’s a big order in our present society where male and female roles are somewhat confused. .. . To me the one essential qualification for a satisfactory daughter-in-law is the ability to be a real woman and like it. For such a girl having children is the most natural thing in the world because it’s what everything is all about... . Parents of a girl child have a powerful determining influence on whether or not their daughter develops these inner patterns of femininity. I hope my daughters-in-law are lucky enough to have Dads who rave over their first fumbling attempts to bake a cake and make dresses for their dolls. (Foster 1956, 44) The telling turn in this discourse is the instability of the terms female and feminine. The notion of a “female” role suggests that while masculinity was a path forward to a career as the cultural realization of natural aptitudes, femininity was a cultural path back to being female, a wife and mother— particularly for

those women who had mistaken a career for the means of identity integration in their lives, which was, of course, motherhood. What was distinctive in both gender formulations, or in a concern with developing a naturalistic schema within which to police them, was the apparent concern that both men and women of the previous generation were lacking in some basic instruction in how to be real men and women, hence fathers and mothers. The fathers were absent and the mothers were overbearing. And while the apparent historical cause for this situation might have been World War II, for experts in child development, the actual cause was the previous generation’s mode of

child-rearing. |

The parent's role in the facilitation of the child’s transition from its naturally determined sex to its culturally prescribed gender thus had more than one motivation. For the individual child, it was a means of insuring that it would have the best chance to be “well-adjusted” and hence to succeed, both

RAISING THE NATURAL CHILD * 293

socially and economically. At the same time, it laid at their feet responsibility for the well-being of American culture and society. Discourses of “natural” child-rearing were meant to assure parents that both the child itself and the culture into which it was entering were relatively plastic and durable, and that a parent who remained relaxed and self-assured was unlikely to do damage

to either—as long as he or she was properly performing his or her gender. This was the field in which publications such as Parents’ worked, raising anxieties about common child-rearing problems, framing their larger significance, and offering concrete practical suggestions for their correction. In like fashion, Disney’s nature films (and their public relations) framed simple animal behaviors as the evolutionary antecedents to suburban American culture and constructed a through line from human prehistory to the current day, mobilizing a similar trope of anxiety and release. Here was the anxiety-producing evolutionary imperative on display, comfortingly framed within a narrative that promised to illuminate the natural roots of human behavior.

Conclusion |

Special displays of books and stories dealing with such personalities as Daniel Boone, Kit Carson, George Rogers Clark and other American

heroes, can be effectively surrounded with stills from “The Vanishing Prairie.” A placard reading: “Before any of these adventures took place, the vast plains of America offered great sagas of tense and dramatic excitement. See the powerful story the grasslands before man ever lived! See Walt Disney’s ‘THE VANISHING PRAIRIE!” —WALT DISNEY PRODUCTIONS 19548, 9

The year 1954 marked a watershed in Disney’s reconquest of the American _ frontier. In August of that year, Disney released The Vanishing Prairie, a nature documentary about the central plains of the United States. In October, the “Disneyland” television program premiered, and November and Decem- , ber featured three Davy Crockett episodes that would become a feature film the following year, opening two months before the park. Disney’s resettling of the West did not begin with Davy Crockett and Frontierland, however. As would be the case for The Vanishing Prairie (1954), the press book for Beaver Valley

(1950) positioned the subjects of the film as preceding, yet providing a (prop- _ erly American) template for subsequent waves of human incursion into the landscape. “The beaver, whose pelts lured pioneers into the West long before gold and land stampeded the emigrant horde,” it announced, “is the leading

294 * CHAPTER FIVE ! |

character in this dramatic presentation of American animal life cycles....A great provider and family man, the beaver is shown in home-and-dam building and in battle with enemies” (Walt Disney Productions 1950c). The rhetoric of this description is almost transparent. The beaver, a “great provider and family

man, is an “American animal” whose pelt attracted the “pioneers” into the landscape long before the greedy “emigrant horde” arrived in search of gold and land. Between the denizens of the real landscape and the first pioneers there existed a real bond, which contrasted with the atavistic desires of subsequent arrivals. Disney invited its audience to gaze back through the complex struggle of many arriviste cultures to a purer version of America that derived not from any particular previous national culture (not even from Anglo settler culture), but from the landscape itself.

Yet this second conquest of North America entailed much more than a couple of television programs, a few coonskin caps, and some cute animal tricks. For Disney, laying claim to the American landscape began with a complex process of erasure and reinscription of the boundary between the human and the animal. The opening sequence of The Vanishing Prairie (1954) is a perfect example of this process. As with every True-Life Adventure, the film moves between animation and live action as a narrative voice-over eliminates from the

landscape any vestige of human presence. In this case, it begins with that impossible object, the map of the territory before it was discovered. “On the map of North America,” the narrator explains, “the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains roughly divide the continent into three parts. Before civilization made its mark on the land, all the territory east of the great river was virgin forest and rolling meadow. West of the Rockies lay pine woods, rugged peaks, and barren deserts.” In the midst of this blank natural map, he continues, lay an inland sea of grass, across which “white-topped prairie schooners” (suggesting pilgrim ships) made their way. As the animation cross-fades to live action, the narrator suggests a link between past and present, in which “here and there,

: deep grooved in the face of the prairie, some of the old wagon trails . . . still remain to mark the passing of an era.” Yet this is not the beginning of the history of the American plains. The liveaction images of the prairie cross-fade back into animation, and we are told that “long before the wagon trains rolled west toward the setting sun, it was the red man who claimed this vast domain as his own. To him it was a land

of plenty and in his primitive way he kept a record of the abundance nature gave him. .. . For this was his paradise to use as he chose . . . his happy hunting ground created on earth.” The narrator gives us a sample of this record, a roll call of (unspecified) “Indian” names for plants and animals. Then, in a RAISING THE NATURAL CHILD * 295

classic stroke from the rhetoric of natural history that compresses the lives and struggles of various peoples under the master sign of temporally and spatially advancing “civilization” by contrasting the immensity of a geologic time with human history, the voiceover further erases human presence from the landscape, claiming, “But this was only yesterday. There was an earlier time...a

the prairie realm.” a 7

, time without record or remembrance when nature alone held dominion over | In this earlier time, we are told, nature was unimpeded by civilization, and the interplay of animal habits unambiguously prefigured the origins of natu-

ral human culture. And though this epoch seems utterly inaccessible, thereis an avenue to that unpolluted past. As the last remnants of animation fade, the _ narrator intones, “Of the teeming millions . . . of wild creatures that thrived in that by-gone day, only a few scattered remnants survive . . . still. . . . It’s enough for us to gain a glimpse of the past and fora little while in this True-Life | Adventure . . . re-create the wondrous pageant that . . . was nature’s prairie.” Of course, Disney didn’t produce the metaphor of the frontier from whole cloth. Since Frederick Jackson Turner’s seminal work on the subject at the — dawn of the twentieth century, the frontier had operated as a master trope in — any number of discussions about the American psyche.” Since film’s beginnings, the western had been a perennial Hollywood product, from Edwin S. Porter's groundbreaking The Great Train Robbery (1903), to the spate of back-lot __ oaters by favorites such as Tom Mix and William S. Hart, to the classic pro- | ductions of John Ford and Howard Hawks. But the conflation of the American.

ae frontier with the burgeoning suburban landscape, and of American postwar social organization with that of the early American West, were very much creations of the 1950s.** As David Riesman imagined it in the same year that _ The Vanishing Prairie and “Disneyland” opened, the growth of the American suburbs recapitulated the frontier experience, both in its familiarity and in its | strangeness. “Whereas the explorers of the last century moved to the frontiers of production and opened fisheries, mines, and mills,” he told his readers

(1954, 211-12), “the explorers of this century seem . . . to be moving to the

, frontiers of consumption. . . . The move to the suburb, as it occurs in contemporary America, is emotionally, if not geographically, something almost unprecedented historically; and those who move to any new frontier are likely

to pay a price, in loneliness and discomfort.” _ . Oo , Indeed, by 1954, the image of the frontier had become common. It was used to describe people’s relationship not only to a new external landscape, . but also to a landscape latent in the American ethos, one now evincing itself

296 * CHAPTER FIVE a ee

as an emerging common American culture. As sociologist and sometime demographer Lyman Bryson put it in The Next America (1952, 179-80):

The women of the pioneer West took the love of gentleness and beauty with them into the scrub and sand, the heat and blizzards, and were not defeated. The struggle they began goes on today, nearer to triumph. They and their building men did not wait for institutions to grow. . . . they made flexible and open institutions which have survived the transformations of industrial life. . . . [This leadership] is latent in American life [and]... . that we can accomplish .. . our deep ambition to make our culture common to nearly everyone... . These leaders are a natural product of our time. For theorists such as Bryson or Riesman, the 1950s were inherently a frontier moment, a period the novelty of which naturally evoked dormant qualities forged in the tumult of the previous century. Even William Whyte, whose skepticism set him apart from many other chroniclers of the period, found it necessary to address the concept (1956, 396): “When the suburbanites speak of re-establishing the spirit of the frontier communities, there is a truth in their analogy. Our country was born asa series of highly communal enterprises, and though the individualist may have opened the frontier, it was the co-operative who settled it.”

Though brief, Whyte’s observation speaks directly to the key contradictions embodied in the figure of the frontier. Evoked as a time and a place that produced rugged individuals, the frontier was imagined as an antidote to a tendency toward excessive mass behavior and the regimentation of daily life in the new managerial middle class and in the suburbs. At the same time, though, the

frontier was reimagined as an environment in which people pulled together into collective organizations, not out of compulsion, but in order to confront a hostile environment. This narrative served to naturalize the nation’s postwar (and post-Depression) social and economic integration as deriving from the land (as opposed to the state, as was the case in the Soviet Union) and to suggest a prophylactic against the internalization of authoritarian impulses in the newly integrated mass culture and society. This was the environment Disney offered in True-Life Adventures such as The Vanishing Prairie and White Wilderness, one in which nature provided a redemptive moment in which parents could imagine correcting the errors generated by historical necessity on the previous frontier — those of the absent father and domineering mother—by witnessing the effects of natural parenting. The elimination of “Momism” was necessary to secure a new frontier, and Disney’s

RAISING THE NATURAL CHILD +* 297

nature films made visible the natural order and evolutionary path from which parents had purportedly strayed while inadvertently producing it, offering a way out of that collective pathology. This frontier became important not because it tempered the overbearing individualism of the Victorian father, but because it attenuated the threat of the domineering mother. Providing balance

and adjustment, this was a new ecology of gender. © - | The trope of the frontier, then, embodied a desperate optimism, a need to see American mass culture as originating in a natural landscape and able to successfully assimilate later cultural incursions into that landscape. Beyond a

, sociologist’s metaphor for a new social formation, though, fascination with __ the frontier was a mass phenomenon, a popular explanation fora seemingly _ new era. Indeed, as Whyte indicates, the popularity of the term —and the resonance it created between a consuming public and its producers— compelled scholarly commentaries on the phenomenon that in themselves confirmed to

a literate, middle-class public the validity of the metaphor. _. As its appearance in popular sociological descriptions of American society should suggest, the metaphor of the frontier was far more than a tidy shorthand description. It formed a response to a widely held concern about the need to attenuate the excesses of rapidly rationalizing and interwoven social and economic systems, to avoid a totalitarian state and citizens willing to participate in it. Disney’s claim to an expertise in delivering an unadulterated nature resonated in a discursive environment in which the naturally raised child was considered essential to the future well-being of democratic capitalism, and in which parents in particular were considered (unreliable) arbiters of the differ-

ence between the natural and the cultural. The natural animal families that preceded and (seemingly) informed Disney’s popular frontier human charac-

ters were templates for their human suburban counterparts. The company promised an unbroken line of sight from the new suburban landscape back toward an unpeopled frontier in which proper social relations naturally ob- | tained. This depopulated vista required, of course, the unwriting of a very human history, the erasure not only of the “emigrant horde,” but also of indigenous peoples, and the reinscription of the American landscape of The Vanishing Prairie.” “Buffalo, antelope, Bighorn sheep, mountain lion, coyote, badger, and prairie dogs,” the narrator intoned, “all these breeds in remnant bands of the once great herds and flocks that roved the prairie are here related in a common factual drama. They are truly vanishing Americans fighting hard for existence” (Walt Disney Productions 1954b). In this history, animals replaced indigenous people as threatened, and represented not so much an ecosystem,

but a symbolic order that could teach each generation what it meant to be |

298 * CHAPTER FIVE ,

naturally American. Disney promised access to that dying order, an absolutely “factual” record of natural families, environments, and behaviors in the face of an alienating, rationalized society. But parents and children lived both in that rationalized society and in the symbolic order. The clearing where they met was the center of the Disney cosmos, where “animal behavior often reveals the instinctive beginnings of the deepest, most basic human emotions” (Disney 1953).*° The 1950s saw the rebirth of Walt Disney Productions after a rather fallow 1940s (Smoodin 1993). Walt the man metamorphosed from the ultimate industrial manager into the benign human face of science and the gentle and wise translator of the natural

into the cultural. His eponymous corporation changed, too, from a Fordist animation factory to an international organization dedicated to articulating relationships between nature and culture, past and future, real and fantastic — in films, on television, and in its new theme park. If the suburbs represented a cold-war “fact on the ground,” then Disneyland (as the name of both the place and the television show) was a means by which that global fact became local — the crystallization of the fantasy that the generic child’s body represented. So,

let’s all go to Disneyland...

RAISING THE NATURAL CHILD +* 299

6 DISNEY MAPS THE FRONTIER

The Suburban Frontier as Contact Zone Disneyland’s Main Street, U.S.A., offers a staging area for understanding the Disney cosmos, circa 1955. Spatially linking Disneyland’s four zones, it represents an ideal of American life, genteel and placid, a picture of small-town living circa 1901 (the year of Walt’s birth), Middletown in the moments before it became the epitome of the tensions of a modernizing American society. (See figure 29.) Main Street, U.S.A., links the natural world (Adventureland), to the historical (Frontierland), to the child’s imaginative life (Fantasyland), to the realization of that imagination in the technology of the future (Tomorrowland). From its inception, this fantastic encapsulation of American social and cultural life in the Disney cosmos was predicated on two distinct tropes— one static, one dynamic — operating in tension with each other. Main Street,

| U.S.A., existed as a place out of time: the eternal present of Walt’s childhood. The four lands that surrounded that still center represented an active evolutionary fantasy —from the animal, to the cultural, to the technological — predicated on Walt’s complement, the generic child. Hence, an active arc extending from an ideal prehistoric past to an ideal future wheeled around a still hub, modeling the evolution of American social and cultural life embodied in the imagined child as both changing and changeless, the naturalization and recapitulation of a fantasy of an ideal middle America repeated as theme and variation in every iteration. The iteration contemporary with Disneyland’s opening was the new Ameri-

can suburb, home to the newest evolutionary adaptation to modernization: the natural child at the center of the nuclear family. This child was both a bellwether for conditions prevailing at the time and a set of potentials for a future yet to be realized; it was a conduit from the past into the present and on into the future, and from the domestic, through the local, to the national and international. Just as Disneyland compressed a complex set of relations between nature, culture, and the rationalizing forces of modernization, so the child's

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| spoke as native informant, sharing with his audience the wisdom he brought to (and gained from) the production process, all of which derived from the in-

, herent nature of a simple man possessed by a childlike wonder at the world |

and a simple desire to bring joy to his fellow creatures. a oe I For example, while Walt spoke with a voice of calm authority from the television screen, the studios issued a viewer's guide for teachers, titled Disney oe on Television: A Supplementary Materials Guide for Classroom Use in Connection _ with 2 Television Programs Produced by Walt Disney: Disneyland and Mickey Mouse

Club (Walt Disney Productions 1956a). The guide provided a viewing sched- | ule for the upcoming season, as well as capsule synopses of the programs, and | suggested classroom activities (see figure 32). Its introduction, capped witha —

picture of Walt Disney and ending with a reproduction of his trademark sig- _ |

324 * CHAPTERSIX _ ee . |

B lele-Guding by ||the Teacher Gat: ‘Te _ eo J EE EC RA IM Neo) Foot at Le Bicyc LES, AFETY jg ie

et ee [The “Tele-Di gests’ enclosed, contain the — B/) \\N fe CPO Rare

content upon which the individual pro- J Hk COA 7" Yas ( Ae grams are based. This information will permit Fa Ad | ein/ EAVES ci

teachers toSee discuss programs _ WAS a SO a :aefee fae Og SUP ips) Seg hae Beesthe he PEE 8 Saagwith ciatetheir cee classes ere | ee cee ae. e.' = ; eod 7 ISSES!

unique so the suggestions made here are designed to be idea-provoking rather than

ii , sy py: , ee ee q Sul Bee sttons bor ORE EIRGUENTIOT pe Se ee ea

|... Before Seeing the Program a ee : |” Because teachers, through the content in the tele-digests, have advance information > interest off by letting their classes know the program plan. However, ageneral diss

the name of the program, the station and time for showing on the chalk board,

glarify them tomorrows don’t understand remember what they are and perhapswecan

in Charge, Audio-Visual Section, Los Angeles City Schools, S TERIRMG Reserved Printed in USA;

32. A page from Disney’s guide for teachers to incorporate the Disneyland and Mickey Mouse

Club television programs into the curriculum explained how to structure a lesson around a segment in such a way that students would talk about Disney before and after seeing the

program.

nature, explained the rationale behind the guide. “This publication,” Disney declared, “has been designed to be of direct help to our many friends in the field

of education who have told us they find educational values in our programs. _ Our mail has been heavy with requests from teachers who seek additional supplementary materials which relate to the programs and which can be used in the classroom” (Walt Disney, in Walt Disney Productions 1956a). Seemingly in response to spontaneous requests for expert assistance caused by the inherently educational nature of Disney’s programs, the company pur-

portedly produced thousands of the guides for distribution in the schools, and by extension (since they were meant to augment home viewing), in the home.” Using the guide as an announcement for his company's new Mickey Mouse Club television program, Disney positioned Disneyland (and Walt him-

self) as a sort of generative principle that had moved the company to more fully acknowledge its responsibility as a member of a simultaneously national

and local community:?8 | | ,

From the very first we have been aware of the privilege, as well as the responsibility which we assume, when we enter so many millions of homes each week with our DISN EYLAND program. We feel this even more deeply as we prepare to offer additional programs each day when the majority of our viewing audience will be composed of younger people. . .. We hope all of our programs will provide entertainment, for that is our business. But even beyond this, as we strive to reach our goals, we shall endeavor to place emphasis on the constructive aspects, which can logically be part of “entertainment.” (Walt Disney, in Walt Disney Productions 1956a) The guide thus described a discursive circuit that traveled from “Disneyland,” through teachers, back to Walt Disney Productions, and out again into its ex-

panding slate of television programs. Disney encouraged the sense that the company was immediately responsive to its audiences, and that its response was a refinement of an inherent relationship between entertainment and education. Walt’s picture and signature signaled that this feedback circuit did not end on the desk of an anonymous public-relations officer but extended all | the way up to the organization’s founder and formative principle. Since Walt Disney informed everything his company made and his company and its con-

sumers informed Disney, the circuit was alive. re The guide itself also allowed for a more complex framing of each Disneyland episode than Walt’s televisual introductions allowed. An explicitly educational

guide aimed at a narrower demographic of teachers and parents permitted a further refinement of address that demonstrated the company’s sensitivity

326 * CHAPTER SIX ,

to contemporary thinking about children and its ability to occupy a place in that discourse. Allowing “nature” to frame a lesson for teachers and parents, for instance, Disney described its short film and television segment Stormy the Thoroughbred (1954) as “a factual story about a horse who ‘didn’t belong.’ Foaled, by a trick of nature, at the wrong time of the year, this little thoroughbred was denied the glory of the racetrack but proved his worth and breeding as a polo pony. This is the story of a colt who overcame his inferiority complex

and the understanding people who recognized his true worth” (Walt Disney Productions 1956a).*°

Policing the porous border between the natural and the cultural, Disney borrowed a page from Spock in describing a horse’s very human alienation and sense of inferiority as deriving from a set of natural circumstances and correctable through a close reading of his latent traumas and abilities. Disney reinforced its claim to an expert understanding of the natural world by framing this tale (among others in the guide) with several of its True-Life Adventures, and with the short nature feature Survival in Nature (1956), which was constructed from segments of those films. Recycling material that had not caught the public imagination or wasn’t appropriate for theatrical release, the guide promised an episode from Disney’s failed People and Places travelogue series, The Seri Indians (which was never released), as well as one of its Science-Factual series, Man and the Moon (1955). And, touting its Davy Crockett and the River Pilots episode, the company carefully turned a phrase to lay claim to a piece of American history without claiming actual historical knowledge: “Sometimes it’s difficult for even students of history to know for sure when ‘history’ stops and the legends begin where such a beloved character as Davy Crockett is concerned. This is not the case here, however. Davy and his amazing exploits as he cleans out the river pirates along the Ohio, is a most satisfying tale” (Walt Disney Productions 1956a).*° Apparently, it was up to the teacher or parent to clarify whether this “most satisfying tale” ultimately qualified as history or legend.

This guide was important not simply because it stood as an example of Disney’s place in the child’s educational experience, but because it did so by offering a substantial link between the child’s formation in two distinct environments: the home and school. To a certain extent, those worlds were antipathetic: school was a regulated, structuring organ more or less associated with the state, and particularly by the 1950s, the middle-class home was imagined as a haven from the excesses of that rationalization, a space where more natural social relations obtained. Yet the figure of the child and the discourse of media effects—the competing ideas that television might adversely or posiDISNEY MAPS THE FRONTIER * 327

tively affect a child’s abilities, or that the child properly raised and educated might better use television to its own ends—linked both worlds through a set of parental hopes and anxieties. The themed experience of “Disneyland,” _ with “Professor Walt” as narrator, seemed to bridge these two realms through “educational entertainment.” Although Disney’s theming may have arisen as a mechanism for imposing a commodifiable order on its diversification, it also. formally replicated the topical division of a child’s education, ostensibly separating the natural sciences from technological studies and history from creative fictions, then linking them through Walt’s body and voice just as their counterparts were linked through the child’s teacher. Yet perhaps unlike the teacher, Walt Disney performed for his family audience an apparently instinctive understanding of the relationship between nature and culture, and a sense of having mastery over technology rather than being mastered by it. In a socio-

| cultural moment in which a properly policed border between the natural and the cultural in the bodies and behaviors of children was of extreme import, Disneyland —the immediate instantiation of Walt Disney’s vision of the order of things — walked that border weekly in American homes and inscribed it on

the ground at the park. - | | 7

, Although there is little evidence that Disney’s guides were widely used in the schools, they apparently were distributed for several years and represent the beginnings of the company’s current extensive ventures in education." —

More significantly, though, they are artifacts of an imaginary working rela~ tionship (though by no means an equal one) between the company and its _ audiences. In this colloquy, Disney constructed its audience as interested in the version of nature outlined above, as concerned about the effects of television | on children, and as responsive to approaches that addressed those interests and

concerns. And although the company represented its interests inthe matter as. a gesture of responsible corporate citizenship, it assured its stockholders that these techniques were a reasoned response to the needs of the new mass middle class, a meeting of “mass audience preferences and proved production

practices” (Walt Disney Productions 1957, 2). ee _ Although institutions such as Disney had a relative advantage over parents _ in their degree of organization, and thus were better positioned to channel and

shape discourse, they did not generate it independently.» Drawing from child- | } rearing experts such as Spock— who themselves drew from Freud, and from popular social theorists such as Erikson and Mead— middle-class parents (and

parents aspiring to the middle class) brought to their consumption a concept of the child as a creature whose natural development needed protection from _ an excess of social regulation (see chapter 5). The attractiveness of Disney’s

328 x CHAPTER SIX | ee ae ,

version of the boundary between the natural and the cultural was not just that it reproduced a recognizable simulacrum of suburban America in the lives of lower orders, but that it suggested through its products and public relations that in those animals parents could locate their proper and natural behaviors and those of their children.** For parents concerned about encouraging natural behavior in their children and uncertain about their own understanding of what was natural, Disney and its distributors provided a location for working out that anxiety. Many of these negotiations would find physical and practical expression as a burgeoning American middle class sought a more stable boundary between nature and culture in the suburbs. That they would take place around the new and still somewhat strange technology of television, increasingly a fixture in the suburbs, is both ironic and understandable.

The Effect of Television We have said something about television. Now, what is a child? A child is a

young animal learning to be a human. Then he is a young human, being socialized by his elders so that he may assume a place among them... . He has barely learned the role of a child when he finds himself no longer a child and having to play the role of an adolescent, a courtship role, or a pre-occupational role. —SCHRAMM, LYLE, AND PARKER 1961, 142

The 1950s were properly (though not technically) the decade in which television was born as a mass medium, as well as the decade in which the study of the effects of media on children became firmly institutionalized. In Television in the Lives of Our Children (Schramm, Lyle, and Parker 1961), a three-year study on television effects, Wilbur Schramm, of Stanford University’s Institution for

Communication Research, detailed the expansion of both the medium and its study. In the course of ten years, he asserted, television had grown from a minor phenomenon in the cultural landscape to a central fact in American daily life. “At the beginning of 1948,” Schramm stated, “there were barely 100,000 television receiving sets in use in the United States. In 1949, there were a million; at the end of 1959, 50 million. At the beginning of the 1950’s, about one out of 15 U.S. homes had television. At the end of the 1950’s, seven out of eight homes had it” (11). During the same period, arguments about the effects of television had changed, from personal opinion pieces that bemoaned television as yet one more assault by the forces of mass culture against decency, to (rather vague) studies of the effects of television on family togetherness, to detailed DISNEY MAPS THE FRONTIER ¥* 329

and rigorous research that attempted to isolate exactly television's effect on the minds, bodies, and social relationships of children and adults alike.” The net result of this research, Schramm suggested, was as yet uncertain. Speaking to the effect of television on children in particular, he warned his

readers, ,

The term “effect” is misleading because it suggests that television “does something” to children. The connotation is that television is the actor; the children are acted upon. Children are thus made to seem relatively inert; television, relatively active. Children are sitting victims; television bites them. . . . Nothing could be further from the fact. . . . It is the children who are most active in this relationship. It is they who use television, rather than television that uses them. (Schramm, Lyle, and Parker 1961, 1) Accepting television as a social fact, Schramm offered a thorough review of the literature on the subject, presented the relatively inconclusive findings of his

own study, and suggested, rather sensibly, that what television did to children depended largely on what those children did with television. Indeed, Schramm had made much the same point in 1949, speaking more of radio than of tele-

vision: |

The large amount of escape and entertainment material on mass media does not change people’s interests or behavior patterns, but is rather used , in accordance with existing interests and behavior patterns. (That is, persons who have a great deal of social awareness ordinarily select more of that kind of material, less escape material, from mass media. Persons who have less social awareness select more escape material. Whether the escapist content of mass media encourages social apathy is not known.) (quoted

in Shayon 1951, 23) | The congruity of these two statements begs some questions. If mass media in general (and television in particular) had no significant effect on people (and on children in particular), then why had Schramm spent twelve years studying the question further, contributing to the formation ofan institutional network that grew rapidly around the question during the 1950s? While an institutional history might go a long way to answering that basic question, explaining the persistence of researchers in exploring what seemed a moot point, it would answer neither why funders continued to support the research, nor why it continues today as a central element in popular debates about the social formation of childhood. For Schramm’s observation about the lack of television effects on children came not in the conclusion to his text, but on the first page. What

330 * CHAPTER SIX

followed that initial observation —in a text that placed quantitative analyses in appendices and a more generally readable summary up front — was a detailed discussion of how television might affect children as one factor in relation to a number of other factors in their lives, as well as a discussion of what parents could do to minimize television’s negative effects on their children’s lives.’ Like many other texts in the history of media-effects research, Schramm’s book effectively shifted the onus of social action from the regulation of the medium itself to the regulation of the social and material relations of its consumers.*” Given the long prior history of this phenomenon (consider the work of the mpppa in the 1920s and 1930s, and its offshoot mpAa in later decades), the rhetorical shift from a focus on industrial regulation to the consumption practices of individual consumers is hardly unusual. Yet in terms of the behaviors and social practices it isolated in television viewers, and in terms of those it prescribed as an antidote to the excesses of the medium, Schramm’s work offers a historically valuable outline of the social and cultural landscape forming around American media consumption at the time.

While Schramm’s text ostensibly addressed itself to parents concerned about understanding television’s effects on their children, as well as the appropriate response to those effects, it also offered hints of another focus embedded in the work. “The effect of television,” he wrote (Schramm, Lyle, and Parker 1961, 143), is an interaction between characteristics of television and charac-

teristics of its users. The question now is what is the minimum number of television variables and user variables that will let us understand and predict this interaction.” This brief passage points to the generally divided nature of effects research in the 1950s. Given that it was the rare parent who would be able

to track a limited set of television variables against a second set of “user variables,” the text suggests uses for the data gathered other than that of optimizing the child’s development through a refinement of its viewing experience. Research on media effects might have applied equally well to the refinement of advertising techniques, or of programming. Drawing in part from a long history of federal government propaganda research, in part from market research techniques, and, to a lesser degree, from research on film and children, television effects research often threatened to operate at cross-purposes, serving two seemingly opposed sides of the debate —the advertisers and broadcasters who purportedly affected children, and the (parents of) children affected by TV.

A moment's description will make these connections clearer. Early work on propaganda during both world wars had proceeded on the assumption that the American people had to be mobilized to support the war effort. This research DISNEY MAPS THE FRONTIER * 331

had two elements: one that analyzed how people received and worked with information, and another that studied the most effective means of delivering that information.* As has been the case with many technologies developed during wartime, the results of that research and the people who had done that work were transferred to the private sector after each war —and effective communication was reconceived as the mobilization of support for products rather than policies. As sociologist Robert Merton, one of the most prominent figures in the emerging field of communication research, put it in 1946, shortly before the rise of Joseph McCarthy:

, Never before the present day has the quick persuasion of masses of people occurred on such a vast scale. The trivial and the large decisions alike are

made the object of deliberate control. Large populations are brought to prefer a given brand of soap or hair tonic or laxative. Or, predisposed by their conditions of life, large masses are persuaded to follow a political leader who means many things to many men. Loyalties are captured and control of mass behavior temporarily ensured. Masses of men move in paths laid down for them by those who persuade. (1) More simply put, the effective distance between patriotism and brand loyalty was perhaps not so wide as one might imagine, and the soapbox served an important function in both arenas. This model of communication — which was first applied primarily to radio and print advertising — assumed that there were always competitive forces at work, struggling for the eyes and ears of the public. During wartime, the government’s (or individual politician’s) aim was to persuade its public of the moral rectitude of its policies; during peacetime each advertiser’s aim was to convince its public of the desirability of its products. This led, of course, to a slight moral queasiness on the part of researchers (as well as the public): given effective techniques, couldn't a people (or, perhaps, children) be persuaded just as easily to do the wrong thing as the right? This uncertainty expressed itself in contradictory impulses in the tenor of effects research: on the one hand, the media were increasingly viewed as an indispensable tool in any large campaign to win the hearts and minds of a public; on the other, communication researchers reassured the public that people in general, and even children, could rarely be influenced directly by media. The ever more refined models of communication research— from the “hypodermic” model to the “two-step flow” model, to the “uses and gratifica_ tions” model, and so on— presented an ever more attenuated picture of media effects in which technology itself became less and less directly implicated in the process of persuasion, and social relations played a greater and greater role in 332 * CHAPTER SIX

the final determination of whether individuals were susceptible to media manipulation. While an ongoing public fascination and unease with television’s purported powers of persuasion created a conducive atmosphere for funding studies that provided definitive answers as to its ability to control the hearts and minds of Americans, the most common assumption among researchers was that the best inoculant against persuasion was a proper moral and behavioral upbringing. And, as had been the case in the previous generation, susceptibility to media manipulation became a marker of poor socialization or inferior cultural formation —in short, an indicator of failed assimilation into an essentially American middle class. In addition, the United States in the 1950s was at war, not only on the ground with Korea in the early part of the decade, but also in an ideological war with the Soviet Union. In this context, concerns (and skills) around mass persuasion in the media sometimes dovetailed with those of political persuasion. The two even intersected in the persons of researchers: Schramm, for instance, worked in the Office of War Information during World War II and also served as “a consultant on psychological warfare with the Air Force and on educational services with the War, Navy, and Defense Departments” (Schramm 1959, 1). Another early communication researcher, Carl Hovland, brought many film-effects research techniques—such as the use of polygraphs and before/after questionnaires —to his work for the Information and Education Division of the United States Army. In that work, Hovland and his associates attempted to ascertain the effectiveness of Frank Capra’s Why We Fight films and fully expected that their research would yield “principles which would apply more generally to any mass communication medium” (Hovland, Lumsdaine, and Shefheld 1949, 3-4). In a 1953 textbook on persuasion techniques, Hovland made explicit the promise and the threat of cold-war communication research:

In the sphere of international relations, numerous practical communication problems are posed by the “cold war,” particularly for government policy makers who wish to increase our “influence” on the people of

, foreign countries and to counteract potentially disruptive foreign propaganda. Also a major concern of agencies such as UNESCO is in developing mass educational programs that will be effective in breaking down psychological barriers which prevent mutual understanding between nations. A

similar need has long been apparent to leaders within our own country who have worked to counteract racial, ethnic, and religious prejudices interfering with the consistent operation of democratic values. (Hovland, Janis, and Kelly 1953, 1)

DISNEY MAPS THE FRONTIER * 333

The promise of such research was that it would yield effective means of promoting democratic capitalism both at home and abroad. The threat was that

the techniques developed in pursuit of an ideological victory could also serve less noble purposes, and a populace primed to accept the ministrations of mass persuasion could also be manipulated for less than democratic ends. Even — though researchers such as Hovland or Schramm went to great lengths to spec-

ify that their work could not, in and of itself, be used to generate opinion, at | the same time they did claim that the tools they developed could be used to normalize or channel popular taste and opinions that were widely held but not yet fully articulated.” In this model, mass media did not create opinion or taste; rather, it crystallized latent sentiments and ideas, providing a vehicle through which disparate individuals and groups could develop an awareness of a shared community of beliefs or values. This recapitulated the linked ideas of the threat of bad media and the promise of good media— such as that which

Disney offered. ' : Oo As had been the case with film, the people considered most at risk of outright manipulation were those who lacked a significantly robust and articulated architecture of opinions and behaviors —in particular, children. If there were a soft spot in the culture at which television might actually significantly influence behaviors and ideas— rather than simply focusing them — its location coincided with this most potentially lucrative and fastest-growing segment of | _ Baby Boom America. Summing up concerns raised at the 1960 White House Conference on Children and Youth, historian Foster Dulles warned that a “dan-

ger that is often pointed out, for both adults and children, is the part both radio and television have had in impressing uniformity upon American life. It is charged that the omnipresent commercials tend to force upon society patterns of behavior that are destroying the individuality of an earlier age, and

that herein lies one of the greatest changes in American society since the days ,

still symbolized by the frontier” (Dulles 1960, 15). a The uniformity to which Dulles referred (in opposition to the implicit indi-

, vidualism of the frontier) had several aspects. It first referred to family viewing _ habits, in which the complex interpersonal relations that made up family life _ were reduced (in principle) to the leveling practice of silent sitting and watch-

| ing.” It also had to do with the uniformity of mass consumption, in which family after family was encouraged, in a simultaneous fashion never before possible, to buy the same products. And, finally, for children it had to do with

, status issues surrounding the ownership of televisions and the relative freedom to watch programs and to buy products associated with them. In this final point there was a tacit acknowledgment of the emergence of what is now often

334. * CHAPTERSIX — |

referred to as a “children’s culture” that was based heavily around consumption and associated status rituals:*

In the case of children, who are particularly susceptible to all influences making for conformity, television does often appear to spell out attitudes from which the child departs at his peril. The first of these is the compulsion to watch television. And then there are all the behavior patterns which television suggests as the accepted norm for well-adjusted boys and girls. Somewhat ironically, in the light of complaints that the freedom and individualism of frontier days have been lost, it might be noted that the popularity of Westerns remains one of the most intriguing features of television programming. Witness how the child world can be swept by such a craze as the Davy Crockett fad! (Dulles 1960, 15) Television and its child viewers represented a strange confluence of conflicting

interests and a need to generate some sort of coherent response to the immense social fact of television. By the end of the decade, with a set in almost every American home, the medium was largely a commercial venture funded through advertising, and it was the most prominent node in a mass cultural system that promised prosperity and national unity on a scale never before

imagined. At the same time, though, it signified the threat of a totalitarian : conformity in the surrender of American individuality to an essentially uniform technology and social practice.*” Thus, most communication researchers could produce data useful both to parents and to advertisers, and Dulles could find strange comfort in children’s mass consumption of the frontier individualism of Davy Crockett (a Disney character) as somehow compensating for the standardization of behavior that television seemed capable of producing. If mass consumption were an inevitable component in television watching, at least its potential damage might be ameliorated by offering up symbols of idealized individualism. On the other side of the coin, Wilbur Schramm suggested that what mattered was not so much what children consumed via television as what they did with that material. Although it was important to demand quality programming, it was far more important to supply the child with the tools necessary to face the programming that existed in the moment. This was, of course, largely the parent’s responsibility. In a list of social and behavioral attributes as useful to advertisers attempting to access the youth market as to parents trying to moderate television's effects, Schramm detailed the significant dependent and independent variables resident within the child (as opposed to within television) as: mental ability, social norms, social relationships, age, and DISNEY MAPS THE FRONTIER * 335

sex. Although mental ability, age, and sex were considered immutable, social | norms and relationships weren't. There, Schramm specified that the norms a child would bring to its side of the television screen would be “chiefly the degree to which [it] has internalized the middle-class norm of activity, self betterment, and deferred gratification” (Schramm, Lyle, and Parker 196I, 144). The social relationships the child would bring to television would be those developed between itself and its family and peer group(s). The greater the child’s mental ability, he suggested, and the better it was socialized, the more likely it would be to understand television as a form of entertainment and nota lens

through which to view reality, and the less likely it would be to internalize

socially destructive inputs. , |

Several significant assumptions were passed on through this formulation.

First and foremost, it further naturalized the middle class as the location of | norms necessary for a child’s success in the world (its ability to fend off television’s deleterious effects). More particularly, it continued an intellectual trajectory begun by white, Protestant, progressive reformers in discourses of . assimilation developed two generations earlier— once again reinscribing a selfreflexive definition of the middle-class as both natural and necessary to a child’s well-being (see chapter 2). Finally —and paradoxically —it suggested a set of middle-class norms to which the child would have to conform if it were to

avoid the conformist impulses that television might otherwise amplify. This contradictory prescription —conform to avoid conformity — produced anxi- . eties that found their popular expression in less judicious warnings about television’s effects in popular periodicals, and which expanded the list of perpetrators to include not only the producers of popular entertainments but also their abettors — advertisers. And, as had been the case with film, this discussion of negative effects and products created a space for the marketing of products

that promised positive effects. - ,

Television: The Two-Way Mirror , Oo Although television-effects research inherited some theoretical concerns and approaches from earlier work on film effects, it differed from that earlier research (and was more similar to research on the effects of radio) for an im- portant reason: advertising. Like radio, television delivered the advertiser into individual homes and, by interweaving commercials within programming, better insured an audience for those commercials. Or, as Dallas Smythe (1977) put it, television was a device for delivering audiences to advertisers. Also like radio, television promised a limited range of settings and social practices into

336 * CHAPTER SIX Oo |

which advertising was delivered— generally within the home, in a room designated as family common space (the living room or den), and often as part of family social life —as well as demographically divided viewing times when more specific audiences — particularly children and women — were likely to be watching. Unlike radio, of course, television had the added impact of visual representation. It could actually show people enjoying products in their daily lives. While this was considered a negligible effect for adults, who were assumed to be able to tell the difference between reality and fantasy, there existed among popular critics (much more so than researchers) a concern that this distinction was lost on children—particularly those then being raised under new “permissive” regimes that encouraged them not to repress their own desires. In a study often cited in popular articles on television effects, “What Effect Does Tv Advertising Have on Children?” (Brumbaugh 1954), Florence Brumbaugh asserted that children showed alarming recall when asked to list the products they had seen on television, and that “when asked reasons for liking or disliking commercials, many of the children gave slogans verbatim . . . [such as] ‘It is good for the teeth and body building; the man said so’ ” and that in many cases, “the spelling of trade names was correct in almost every case even to capitalization and hyphenated words although many of them were nonphonetic, had several syllables, and were far more difficult than words in spelling lists” (33). Although Brumbaugh later cautioned that “the degree to which televised advertising is conditioning children is difficult to determine, since the same articles are usually advertised on radio and in newspapers and magazines,” the image of children mindlessly and precisely spouting advertising slogans from television was frightening. In Television and Our Children, a series of articles originally written for the Christian Science Monitor and later compiled in book form, Robert Shayon (1951) warned parents that advertisers controlled television, that a survey of businessmen in advertising, marketing, and public relations revealed that those very men were themselves concerned about television’s effects on children, and that a “heavy majority (67 per cent) believes that viewing cuts into children’s reading and study time sufficiently to be detrimental to their education. One states bitterly that he must eat dinner in the dark so the family can watch tv. Another hails the medium as a great boon to manufacturers of cowboy suits and toy guns, but denies it any other virtue” (19-20).

Unsurprisingly, the survey, from Tide magazine, an advertising industry organ, focused less on advertising’s ability to control young minds, and more on another aspect of television of concern to parents: its ability to distract DISNEY MAPS THE FRONTIER * 337

young viewers from other activities such as homework and outdoor play. In narratives reminiscent of those used to describe the victims of totalitarian brainwashing, popular critics (and some effects researchers) conjured up images of mesmerized children unable to tear themselves away from Tv.*’ Even

Wilbur Schramm acknowledged its uncanny attraction, warning, , One of the distinguishing characteristics of television is its absorbing quality. This is innate in the medium. It commands both eyes and ears. It focuses attention on movement within a small space. It puts this small space into one’s living room, or beside the dining table, or wherever one finds it most convenient. A user does not have to go out, or buy tickets. Without rising from his chair, he can connect his vision and hearing to studios, stages, and new cameras in distant places. All the conditions for attention and absorption are therefore built into the medium. (Schramm,

Lyle, and Parker 1961, 135) .

Television’s narcotizing quality was often described in lurid detail, in rhetoric that suggested that its critics were not only carefully observing and cataloging its effects but were shocked by what they witnessed, as was one teacher

whose distressed observations Shayon quoted atlength: : “The children are tired nervously, physically, emotionally, and mentally; they show the effects of eye-strain; they have acquired erroneous ideas; and their minds are so completely engrossed by television, that they have no capacity for learning. . .. They have no sense of values, no feeling of wonder, no sustained interest. Their shallowness of thought and feeling is markedly apparent, and they display a lack of cooperation and an inability to finish a task. Could this be the result of passively sitting and watching?

Or are minds and bodies alike, too tired?” (Shayon 1951, 20) , | One researcher was so convinced that these effects were caused by the medium

itself that he was quite comfortable extrapolating to the general population from observations of the viewing behaviors of institutionalized schizophrenics, and arguing that television fostered in children “traits of passivity, receptiveness .. . absorbing what is offered.” While adults were merely hypnotized

by the medium, children were actually damaged: Activity, self-reliance, and aggression are notably absent. A great deal of activity and aggression may be present, but they are deceptive, for the demands and even rages are not to be doing but to be getting. . . . Typical, too, of this character structure are the intensity with which needs are felt,

338 + CHAPTER SIX -

the poor tolerance of frustration and delay, the demand for immediate satisfaction. The television set is easily and agreeably a mother to whom the child readily turns without the same expectations as to her. (Glynn 1956, quoted in Schramm, Lyle, and Parker 1961, 159-60)

Although Schramm took exception to the extent of Glynn’s conclusion— which suggested that in healthy viewers the medium might even inspire aggression —he supported one implicit critique of television, albeit one that focused on the practices surrounding reception rather than on any facet of the technology itself. He agreed that if the child were denied other outlets for its inherent need for and love of activity, it would passively accept television as a substitute, just as it would accept the medium asa replacement forits parents’ _ attentions (159). As Ellen Seiter (1993) has argued, it wasn’t just any parent who bore the brunt of responsibility for leaving children to the mercies of television — it was

mothers in particular. In terms that have become more racialized than they were in the 1950s, cautionary tales were built around the figure of the mother who dared to use the technology as a substitute for one-to-one contact in child care. “Let’s Get Rid of Tele-Violence” (Wharton 1956), an article in Parents’ Magazine that blamed television for an increase in juvenile violence, drifted easily from a specific statistic into an imagined scenario in which an ignorant mother inadvertently neglected her children through well-meaning inattention: “Surveys show that youngsters average 22 to 27 hours a week in front of Tv sets. Television is used by many a mother as a ‘baby-sitter. She leaves her children with the set, and while she is in the kitchen, trying to get a pure, balanced diet for their stomachs, their minds and emotions are being fed with huge hunks of cheap brutality” (54). Not every contributor to Parents’ shared this position, though. In an article

that surveyed the problem of hostility in children, an author who worked in Yale’s Child-Study Center offered insights that echo more contemporary debates about media effects. “Between the ages of six and eleven,” she acknowledged, “children are avid comic book readers, moviegoers, and television watchers. Parents and teachers are often disturbed by the content of these media, which seem to be concerned mainly with shooting, killing, fighting and with threatening, evil forces” (Escalona 1955, 64). Yet (perhaps echo-

ing Bruno Bettleheim), she suggested that historically this sort of violence had long been part of children’s entertainment, and that “victory of the good over evil through violence and bloodshed has always been a favorite theme for young children. Robin Hood, the Knights of the Round Table... and the Old

DISNEY MAPS THE FRONTIER * 339

7 Testament excited the imagination of young children long before TV, movies,

and comic books existed.”** a - .

This should not suggest that the 1950s saw a balanced debate between those

| who thought that television directly caused behavioral changes in children and those who believed that children were not affected by television, with the “outcome decided by who marshaled the most convincing objective evidence. Rather, most effects research escaped the bind of its divided loyalty between advertisers and parents by augmenting the baby-sitter argument to suggest that any child could be negatively affected by bad television as part of a larger pat-

tern of parental neglect. “I have been in homes in San Francisco during our. large television study there,” Wilbur Schramm told his readers, “in which the _ baby’s crib was pushed up in front of the television set, and the young fellow was turning his head, wide-eyed, from side to side to follow the horses dashing across the screen.” Here, Tv fit into a pattern of larger parental neglect: |

Television, in other words, was serving almost from the beginning asa __ , built-in baby sitter. By the age of three, about a third of all children are already seeing television fairly regularly. By school age, it is about 80 per _ cent; by the end of first grade 90 per cent; By the sixth grade 75 per cent

of all children are seeing television on any given day. The corresponding figure for other media was in no case above 25 per cent. (Schramm 1959,

| 5; emphasis original) ; , Oo

This sort of argument was meant to counter more hysterical calls for indus- _

| try reform, while acknowledging the seriousness of the issue, andto convince parents to participate in the difficult work of regulating their children’s view-

ing, yet it created a trope in which bad parenting seemed a matter of mere > inattention.*” The moment a mother let her guard down, television was there, | waiting like a stranger with candy, and children would find it. “Television is the | shortest cut yet devised, the most accessible backdoor to the grownup world,” Robert Shayon warned (1951, 37). “Television is never too busy to talk to our children. It never shuts them off because it has to prepare dinner. Television

| plays with them, shares its work with them. Television wants their attention,

goes to any length to get it.” __ a

‘In essence, effects theorists and social critics of television expected parents

| _ (i.e., mothers) to stand between two virtually uncontrollable forces—television and their children. Television's tendency was to seek an audience by —

_ whatever means necessary. Children were naturally drawn to television’s nar- , cotizing influence. The best hope a parent had—better than trying to alter | television production or broadcasting, which could take years — was to develop

340 * CHAPTER SIX , | ,

an intimate relationship with each child, understanding it as an individual and inspiring in it a sense of equilibrium with its environment that a mere technology couldn't shake.*° As one contributor to Parents’ Magazine put it, a failure

to do so wasn’t necessarily a horrible personal catastrophe, but it did require attention: What happens as he grows and civilization tames his spontaneity and instincts? Well, to hear the saddest of our Jeremiahs at the peak of their lamentations, these same babies, six, seven, eight years later, are to be found glued to television sets, comic books in hand, radios blaring behind them, immobile except for the rhythmic chomping of their jaws on outsize wads of gum... . Exaggerated? Of course. But not so exaggerated that a sizable group of sensible parents hasn’t become seriously alarmed over what they consider to be a cultural crisis. (Puner 1955, 40, 89) For this author, identified as a mother, the appropriate response to that crisis was to improve the intimate bond of mutual discovery between parent and child through shared activity, a bond facilitated by contact with nature — even (or particularly) nature as presented by Disney. “The feeling of beauty and being a part of beauty and artistry can come in the simplest, homiest activities and sights,” she suggested. “It can come in a spring and sunlit back yard as a mother and child plant bulbs together. . . . In the solemnity of a church, the beauty of a wedding, the wonder and mystery of a kaleidoscope or a peacock spreading its tail in the sun at the zoo. In the flight of a gull or an aerialist at the circus, a Disney nature film” (84). The price for failing to develop this intimate relationship, for some, was an unbalanced child who would find in television satisfaction for and amplification of unwholesome desires and feelings. Summarizing the findings of “child psychologists, Robert Shayon warned parents that if a child’s basic needs are not satisfied, and the resultant aggression is met with more discipline of the wrong sort [authoritarian and unreasonable], and even parental aggression, a vicious cycle is set in motion which feeds upon itself, creating an “excessive” reservoir of aggression in the child. Such a child, whether he rebels openly or becomes deceptively obedient, develops a craving for violence and fantasy which drives him continually to the mass media, particularly Tv. There the child finds unlimited fare but no wholesome satisfaction for an abnormal appetite. (1951, 35) This is not to say, however, that there was widespread agreement as to how exactly a parent was to provide a proper social environment for her child. For DISNEY MAPS THE FRONTIER * 34[

oe social critics outside of effects research, such as David Riesman, child-centered _ approaches were far from a solution to the potentially negative effects of television. In Riesman’s view, they were just another abnegation of parental responsibility and actually prepared the child to accept mass media uncritically. _ , Permissive parents, Riesman argued (1950, 22), had left the development of

| the child largely to itself, its peer group, and its schools, and “the pressures of the school and the peer-group are reinforced and continued . . . by the mass media: movies, radio, comics, and popular culture media generally.” For Riesman, “permissive” child-rearing techniques leveled relations between parent and child such that the parent was no longera proper authority figure. Far from _ the prophylactic against authoritarianism that their adherents imagined, childcentered approaches short-circuited the process by which the child gained au-

| tonomy through internalizing and resisting the directions of its parents and replaced it with a slavish attention to external sources such as friends orthe mass media.*” Thus, the media weren't responsible for social problems as much as were parents who trusted in them too much: “The media are blamed for all of our ills because by chance they have developed at the historical moment when the philosophy about bringing up children has been to leave them to their own

a devices. “Their own devices’ have been the media, and parents have begun to beat a retreat from laissez-faire, without as yet arriving at a well-administered

domestic economy” (Riesman 1954, 197-98). For the parent raising children in this “new-media” environment, the proper course of action was far from clear. For some popular experts, child-centered

oo approaches were the solution; for others, they were the problem. The only consistent point throughout seemed to be that the onus fell on the parent: if things went well, it was because the parent created the proper environment for the child; if things went poorly, that was due to the parent's negligence. In short, the child was a symptomatic marker for parental behaviors, an indica-

, tor of how well integrated into middle-class society a family was. As was the _ , case with many child-rearing manuals, arguments about limiting the effects of media on children were ultimately about regulating not children’s behaviors, but those of their parents.*® “Every time a parent finds himself using television _ asa baby sitter,” Wilbur Schramm suggested, “he could well examine his prac-

, tice and ask whether it is really necessary. Every time a parent finds his child viewing more than two and half hours of television a day, staying inside with — the television set when other children are playing outside, he might well ask himself whether there is anything wrong with the child’s relationships to his

family or with his peer group” (Schramm, Lyle, and Parker 1961, 181-82). _ The parent finding “himself” using television as a babysitter was, of course, |

342 * CHAPTER SIX , | , ,

most likely a woman. Whether tending toward discipline or “permissiveness,”

the parent who regulated her own media consumption, who monitored her own interpersonal relations with her child, and who made sure that she represented the middle-class norms upon which her child’s socialization depended was one that had a fighting chance of producing a child resistant to television’s negative influences. Conversely, if a child evinced problematic behaviors and watched television, it was reasonable to assume that the parent had not properly prepared her child for its relationship with the medium. Paradoxically, part of that preparation seemed to involve television itself. Just as television effects arguments were caught between parents and advertisers, so television itself (within the mainstream of effects theory) served alternately as symptom and as part of the inoculant process. “As parents,” Schramm suggested, “we can try to make our children secure in their interpersonal relationships, and maximize their reality experiences both on television and in real life, so that they will perceive alternatives to the hyperthyroid part of television” (150-51).

Since television was becoming an unavoidable part of daily life, the best a par- | ent could do was to develop the child’s watching skills, and to make sure that it viewed the best fare available.

Like the Web today, television in the 1950s was a new medium, and its novelty bred speculation, hope, and anxiety among pundits, professionals, and

parents alike. And like the Web, it was a medium that children understood better than their parents. Like film before it, the medium was for many a focal point for hope and anxiety —though more of the latter than the former. And

like film, television was imagined as a significant force (or tool) in the reconfiguration of social relations and the spaces in which they occurred. Yet while film’s imaginary force had been attenuated through the reformation and regulation of public entertainment spaces, television played a role in changing social relations in private domestic spaces, particularly in the suburban home.” Not only did television represent a reconfiguration of interpersonal relations in the home by an external force, it also represented an extension of the intrusion of public commercial entities, begun by radio, into the personal and private lives of people henceforth to be known as “viewers” or “the viewing public.” Although the relative scarcity of sets in the early days of the medium may have encouraged collective public viewing, as its popularity grew television’s use became more monadic and located inside the nuclear family, and the very term viewing public became an oxymoron in which a public was constituted in reception rather than in dialog, and in private rather than public spaces.”° At a time when discourses surrounding observation, privacy, and the state control of private lives circulated widely, the epistemological significance DISNEY MAPS THE FRONTIER ¥* 343

of this change was profound. As the examples above suggest, it made view-

| ing an act that was simultaneously public and private, potentially beneficial __ or detrimental, and fraught with uncertainty as to its ultimate social mean- _ ing. This was the discursive matrix within which notions of childhood, childrearing, and media consumption circulated when Walt Disney Productions |

_ moved beyond the “family entertainment” of its Disneyland evening program

Mickey Mouse Club, oe , | into the lucrative and contentious realm of children’s programming with its _

See You Real Soon: The Mickey Mouse Club and the Natural Child | | Disney's Mickey Mouse Club television program premiered on October 3, 1955, almost exactly one year after the premiere of Disneyland and shortly after the

| eponymous park had opened to the public. Making good on Disney’s promise | , to provide entertaining and ostensibly educational television fare to children, , the program ran in the after-school time slot, during which mothers were sup-

posed to be occupied preparing dinner, cleaning, or shopping; fathers were _

still at work; and school-age children were left to their own devices. Children’s television watching during this time period troubled social critics concerned with media effects because it lacked parental supervision, because it could cut into children’s homework, and because it could keep them from more salu- ; brious outdoor play. At the same time, for advertisers the slot was considered a gold mine in which they could pitch directly to children with less concern.

_ about accommodating other demographics. Children’s programming, then, , _ had to respond to a variety of social and institutional forces: it had to deliver youthful audiences to advertisers without appearing too intent on obtaining that market; it had to entertain an increasingly critically adept market segment without threatening or alienating their parents; and to some small degree it had

, to appear to address concerns about media effects on children. For the most part, broadcasters responded to these conflicting forces by airing exciting and ‘melodramatic programming — particularly westerns, such as The. Roy Rogers

, Show (1951- 57) or Cheyenne (1955-63) or more generic adventure programming such as Lassie (1954-71) — interspersed with advertising restrained enough to -

, pass muster as not overly manipulative of children’s suggestible natures, but still targeting a youth audience. Some broadcasters offered ostensibly edu, cational “advertainment” such as Winky Dink and You (1953-57), or children’s —

| variety programming such as Howdy Doody (1948-60). oo _ This was the niche that Disney moved into and helped shape with The _ Mickey Mouse Club. Like Disneyland, the children’s program was highly themed.

344. * CHAPTERSIX - | | 7

Each day had its own motif: Monday was Fun with Music Day, Tuesday was Guest Star Day, Wednesday was Anything Can Happen Day, Thursday was Circus Day, and Friday was Talent Roundup Day.”* Each program was further subdivided and regulated: it began with a sing-along anthem (the “Mickey Mouse March”) and accompanying cartoon, then continued with segments that repeated day to day and week to week, including newsreels, serial stories, nature segments, and other special reports on nature and science. All of the performers, adults and children alike, wore uniform mouse-ear hats and name sweaters and presented themselves at the beginning of each program in military roll-call fashion. Although the program focused on play, creativity, and the exploration of the natural and social worlds, with its uniforms, anthems, drilling, and roll calls, it maintained a strangely military ambiance, as if to offset the exuberance and enthusiasm of its child actors (and audience) with a readily recognizable regimen that could contain and direct their natural energies. Walt Disney, who always wore a very adult suit coat and tie for his introductions to Disneyland, was absent from The Mickey Mouse Club. The two men who

took his place as masters of ceremony, Jimmy and Roy, dressed as oversized | boys in their own mouse-ear hats and name sweaters and joined in with the __ other children in the roll call. Although Walt participated in some talent contests held to recruit Mouseketeers (as the child performers and their audiences were known), his distance from the program itself suggests that the company didn’t find his reassuring, avuncular presence as necessary for children as it did for its family audiences. In fact, The Mickey Mouse Club presented a world in which adults behaved more like larger and older children than like authority figures. Although Jimmy and Roy narrated the unfolding of each program and directed the child Mouseketeers in their games, crafts, and musical numbers, they did so dressed in their pseudochildren’s uniforms and in a form of verbal address meant to suggest a relative degree of equality with their charges on both sides of the screen. Unlike Disneyland — which crafted a world that re-

peated, over and over, tales of family life across species and historical epochs — | The Mickey Mouse Club was meant to read as a relatively adult-free zone, a club-

house for kids in which the grownups attenuated their maturity. This was the leveling of relations between adults and children that David Riesman worried would undermine children’s understanding of adult authority, and the sort of false democracy that irritated William Whyte. Onits surface, the show appeared an uncertain candidate for delivering posi- | tive media effects to children. Read through the lens of popular child-rearing

, discourses and arguments about media effects of the time, though, The Mickey __ Mouse Club provided exactly what parents were told they needed to raise their DISNEY MAPS THE FRONTIER ¥* 345

children properly. In a social imaginary in which children were meant to locate themselves comfortably between the poles of rebellion and rigid conformity, the program presented an environment in which Mouseketeers onscreen and

off learned songs, dance routines, crafts, and other skills in an environment

| charged with their own desire to learn and grow, rather than with the force of external authority. Jimmy’s and Roy’s presentation as oversized children reinforced this conceit: it allowed for the illusion of a symbolic space populated by children — hence unpolluted by the compulsion of adult authority — yet not wholly devoid of the responsible limitation and observation that fended off the potential anarchy of the natural unmodulated by the cultural. If television were to serve as babysitter, this was as good a babysitter as one could expect — one that offered a space for locating and developing skills and interests through

free play, monitored by adults whose masquerade as children permitted the illusion of the absence of a constraining cultural authority that might unduly influence a child’s exploration of its natural talents and inclinations.

The program’s oddly martial format also operated as a counterweight to : its emphasis on individual expression and the child’s exploration of its own natural talents and aptitudes. Whatever its developmental consequences, the regimentation of the children’s dress and their ritual incantations were meant to invoke a “clubhouse” environment in which conformity followed naturally from the child’s desire to belong to its peer group. At the same time, activities designed to encourage the child’s own creativity and its expression of its personal abilities — from talent shows upon which children at home were encouraged to model their own events to arts and crafts demonstrations — suggested the production of an individualism that offset the desire to belong. This was reinforced through the presentation of the Mouseketeers, each of whom had at least one special talent that complemented those of his or her peers. The program resolved the contradiction between individualism and conformity by placing that individualism in the service of the club as a whole, channeling

innate personal talent and drive into collective projects. | As had been the case with Disneyland and with its True-Life Adventures,

Disney modeled the relations it presented in The Mickey Mouse Club on this idea of a constrained, orderly, and purposeful nature. In Disney’s universe, the contradictions between nature and culture that bedeviled parents in the 1950s—that is, the difficult task of enculturating their children without inhibiting the trajectory of their natural development — resolved themselves in a shared project of fulfilling evolutionary imperatives. To aid in this project, The Mickey Mouse Club recycled segments from True-Life Adventures, offering

instructive examples from the animal kingdom. The company further framed 346 * CHAPTERSIX

this task by suggesting that these lessons in natural history could be incorporated into school activities, as was the case with its description of Water Birds (1952) in its teachers’ guide:

Since the beginning of time, the bird has been an inspiration to the artist, the scientist and the poet. . . . Each specie [sic] has an interesting history, but none more fascinating than the story to be found in the habits and customs of the water birds. “Free as a bird” is a familiar expression and yet a bird isn’t really free at all. He rarely makes a flight without a definite purpose, and he has but one full time job— simply to stay alive. . . . Nature, however, lends a helping hand, and in this True-Life Adventure we will discover how she’s adapted the water bird to meet the problems of survival. (Walt Disney Productions 1956a) This notion of an evolutionary determinism in which all creatures were free

to naturally follow their destiny was a central tenet in Disney’s conception of nature, and it coincided with the evolutionary inflection of child-centered _ child-rearing. In this version—theorized by Mead, Erikson, and others, and promulgated by Spock, Buxbaum, and publications such as Parents’—a child raised in harmony with its natural instincts, desires, and aptitudes would naturally gravitate toward its proper place in society, facilitating the gradual progress of that society toward an idyll of democratic capitalism in which potential excesses of conformity were properly channeled into the struggle for personal fulfillment.

Whether by conscious design or as a byproduct of its thematic approach to its diverse properties, Disney recapitulated this fantasy in The Mickey Mouse Club and in its public positioning of the program. According to the company’s public relations, beyond cartoons, sing-alongs, and arts and crafts, “Portions of the MICKEY MOUSE CLUB will touch on travel, science, health, vocational

planning, sports, literature and many other things” (Walt Disney Productions 1956a). This translated into a series of regular segments meant to reflect back to children an understanding of the natural world and their place in it. Beyond pieces of its True-Life Adventures, Disney also promised a weekly “International Newsreel” about children in foreign countries shot by Disney’s naturefilm crews, which was meant to “increase our children’s understanding of children in other parts of the world” (Walt Disney Productions 1956a). The program also promised two segments narrated by Jiminy Cricket (continuing his role as the conscience of small children) — “The Nature of Things” and “This Is You” — which were meant to tie the child’s understanding of the natural world to its understanding of itself (see figure 33). Combining animation DISNEY MAPS THE FRONTIER * 347

and live action, “The Nature of Things” was meant to reveal to children the underlying logic of natural adaptation. In “This Is You,” children were en_. couraged to understand their bodies as natural organisms like those of other creatures.” Finally, moving from “This Is You” to “What I Want to Be,” the - , program worked to link children’s knowledge of themselves as natural creatures to carefully gendered career narratives. In the first “What I Want to Be,” a boy and a girl were granted the chance to pretend to be their adult selves

- working in their chosen careers: | a ,

THE AIRLINE PILOT AND THE HOSTESS: Our pilot and hostess areaboy _

| and a girl, each twelve years old, who have the rare opportunity to ex- _ perience every phase in the operation of a modern airline. The girl goes | through “hostess training” school—the boy learns the many responsibilities of being a pilot. Ten episodes, each filling a 15-minute period, are used , to tell all aspects of this story. It represents the first in a series of “CAREER” stories we call “WHAT I WANT TO BE.” (Walt Disney Productions 1956a) -

_ Thus, Disney offered a framing narrative that moved from the timelessness

| of the animal world, into the child’s body, and on into the future through the enactment of fantasies in which that body was projected into adult roles. Like | | the Disneyland tv dinner, the daily repetition of that cycle was presented as a. ritual of identification through which the child might imagine itself as a natural creature exploring itself and its environment and deriving pleasure from a process in which it gradually located its naturally destined place in society.

«If that were the intended purpose for the program, it would be difficult to

| prove that it achieved its effect. While middle-class parents were concerned about the effect of television on their children, the children themselves were _ interested in entertainment. If, however, the purpose of The Mickey Mouse Club, — |

and of other Disney ventures, was to further involve the corporation andits myriad products in the practices of American everyday life, to create an im- | pression that Disney was involved in the national project of helping children discover themselves as natural beings, and by that impression to increase its

__- market penetration without arousing undue suspicion or hostility, then the _ } company was quite successful. Disney reported to its stockholders in 1958, that

“the Mickey Mouse Club, now in its third season, continues to dominate the na-_

| tional audience ratings for daytime programs. Latest Nielsen survey discloses that the weekday daytime half-hour TV presentation reaches 7,045,000 homes , |

_ daily and is watched by audiences totaling 21,000,000” (1). , For Disney, this translated into a guaranteed audience for as many prod, uct placements as it could safely work into each program, as well as for the —

348 * CHAPTERSIX | | |

PE Van ay ee be bee ee a |. plays an active part in several portions of the MICKEY MOUSE CLUB. In this

7a(a) Bicycle Safety, (b) Fire Safety, (c) Pedes rs | + trian Safety, (d) Water Safety, and {e) Safety «se Ce : : As the title of the series (also the title for the = § RE en ak es

EAR ETUC Re =n this series Jiminy Cricket again assumes a major role, this time somewhat =

: a8 a moderator or master of ceremonies, as he discusses and sings about number

a|=ee) leer ce,iSe ed ere oe

g | the Horse, the Beaver, the Elephant, the Giraffe «-si(és EEE @ and the Camel. Hevshares with his audience Weave) | with these animals which appear strange are | IS Ww ) wy J :

a veally just “THE NATURE OF THINGS” j i on \¥é q OOLTOM CMDR Our friend, the Cricket, in this series tums to

4 oe = He limits himself in this series to spotlighting Pi Ae j ~~ @ — , _each:has the senses of man and degrees ) ee- NTE aia a Pap fee 40 ee ee ee qAe er five ee es ee ee eee oethe eeerelative eeThe eee | ae |TR 1a 27 Which beea developed. first + VS|eaEN San

33. In Disney’s teachers’ guide, Jiminy Cricket (Pinocchio’s conscience) detailed relationships between a child’s play, its body, and the natural world in, respectively, “I’m No Fool,” “This Is You,” and “The Nature of Things.”

program's many sponsors.” In addition to screening segments fromthe True- __ Life Adventures and old cartoons, Disney also promised a “book review” seo| _ ment through which to create awareness about films available through its“edu-. cational” rental service and reprised in licensed Little Golden Books or Dell

| paperbacks, such as those based on Disney’s version of Joel Chandler Harris's work in Song of the South (1946), or The Littlest Outlaw (1955), which Disney de- _scribed as “typical of real books, presented as books on the MICKEY MOUSE ; CLUB BOOK CLUB’ (Walt Disney Productions 1956a). This was in addition, of a

, course, to the uniform hats and clothing that offscreen Mouseketeers could purchase, all of which were licensed to Disney (see figure 34), as wellastothe | myriad Mickey Mouse products already on the market, such as “bath towels, | , wrist watches, Belgian candy, fruit juices, British milk of magnesia and weather : | ~ vanes,” which in 1949, even before the television program, grossed “upwardof $100,000,000 a year for manufacturers using Disney labels” (Wallace 1949, 21).

| Occupying a prime spot in children’s programming and backedbyanalmost thirty-year reputation for being beneficial for children, The Mickey Mouse Club _ |

| permitted Disney to pitch its wares with an impunity available to few other , producers and to offer to its advertisers the umbrella of that reputation from) , under which to market their own products. Describing the savvy advertiserin Advertising and Marketing to Young People (1957), Eugene Gilbert suggestedthat, = “were he to aim at the 6 to 9 year old market, his logical choice of program ,

would be something on the order of the Mickey Mouse Club” (102).2* | -

‘The Mickey Mouse Club provided a form of absolution to parents (i.e., _ mothers) who found in television an extremely useful device for occupying their children while they attended to the requirements of the domestic econ- so omy. Since popular and professional arguments about television effectsonchildren often constructed this practice negatively as leaving childreninthecareof _ a potentially abusive babysitter, programming ostensibly designed to benefit —

| the child formed a potential response to this looming social critique. In addi- tion, the idea ofa “club” allowed for the construction ofa semiprivate space acc _ cessible through “membership,” which offset the very newandveryrealsense _ ofan unbridled televisual public sphere taking root in the privacy ofthe home. ___ Disney’s character-identified and program-identified merchandise became (di- _ oe rectly or indirectly) tokens of membership in a society of viewers and extended -

_ to activities and rituals outside of viewing, suggesting the building ofacom| munity of practice among children left in the care of the television. Thus it was no surprise that Parents’ Magazine carried a positive review for a collection of sing-along records from Disney, recommending the “Official Mickey Mouse ~

} 350 * CHAPTER SIX |

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Filmography

The Adventures of Mr. Ichabod and Mr. Toad. Walt Disney Pictures (U.S.), 1949. James Algar, dir. Alice in Wonderland. Walt Disney Pictures. (U.S.), 1951. Clyde Geronimi and Wilfred Jackson, dirs. Babes in the Woods. Walt Disney Pictures (U.S.), 1932. Burt Gillett, dir. Bambi. Walt Disney Pictures (U.S.), 1942. David Hand, dir. Bear Country. Walt Disney Pictures (U.S.), 1953. James Algar, dir. Beaver Valley. Walt Disney Pictures (U.S.), 1950. James Algar, dir. Broken Toys. Walt Disney Pictures (U.S.), 1935. Ben Sharpsteen, dir. The China Shop. Walt Disney Pictures (U.S.), 1934. Wilfred Jackson, dir. (uncredited). Cinderella. Walt Disney Pictures (U.S.), 1950. Clyde Geronimi and Wilfred Jackson, dirs. Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontie.r Walt Disney Pictures (U.S.), 1954. Norman Foster, dir. Dumbo Walt Disney Pictures. (U.S.), 1941. Ben Sharpsteen, dir. Fantasia Walt Disney Pictures. (U.S.), 1940. James Algar, Samuel Armstrong, Ford Beebe, Norman Ferguson, Jim Handley, T. Hee, Wilfred Jackson, Hamilton Luske,

| Bill Roberts, Paul Satterfield, Ben Sharpsteen, dirs. Flowers and Trees. Walt Disney Pictures (U.S.), 1932. Burt Gillett, dir.

The Great Train Robbery. Edison Manufacturing (U.S.), 1903. Edwin S. Porter, dir. ,

The Littlest Outlaw. Walt Disney Pictures (U.S.), 1950. Roberto Gavaldon, dir. | The Living Desert. Walt Disney Pictures (U.S.), 1953. James Algar, dir. Magic Highway U.S.A. Walt Disney Pictures (U.S.), 1958. Ward Kimball, dir. Man and the Moon. Walt Disney Pictures (U.S.), 1955. Ward Kimball, dir. Nature’s Half Acre. Walt Disney Pictures (U.S.), 1951. James Algar, dir. The Old Mill. Walt Disney Pictures (U.S.), 1937. Wilfred Jackson, dir. The Olympic Elk. Walt Disney Pictures (U.S.), 1952. James Algar, dir. Our Friend the Atom. Walt Disney Pictures (U.S.), 1958. Hamilton Luske, dir. Peck’s Bad Boy. Sol Lesser Productions (U.S.), 1934. Edward F. Cline, dir. Peter Pan. Walt Disney Pictures (U.S.), 1953. Clyde Geromini, Wilfred Jackson, Hamil-

ton Luske, dirs. The Phantom of the Opera. Universal Pictures (U.S.), 1925. Rupert Julian, dir. Pinocchio. Walt Disney Pictures (U.S.), 1940. Hamilton Luske, Ben Sharpsteen, dirs. Prowlers of the Everglades. Walt Disney Pictures (U.S.), 1953. James Algar, dir.

The Reluctant Dragon. Walt Disney Pictures (U.S.), 1941.Alfred Wirker, Ford Beebe, Jasper Blystone, Jim Handley, Hamilton Luske, Erwin L. Verity, dirs. Santa’s Workshop. Walt Disney Pictures (U.S.), 1932. Wilfred Jackson, dir. Seal Island. Walt Disney Pictures (U.S.), 1948. James Algar, dir. Secrets of Life. Walt Disney Pictures (U.S.), 1956. James Algar, dir.

The Seri Indians. Walt Disney Pictures (U.S.), unreleased. , Snow White. Walt Disney Pictures (U.S.), 1937. David Hand, supervising dir. Song of the South. Walt Disney Pictures (U.S.), 1946. Harve Foster, Wilfred Jackson, dirs. Steamboat Willie. Walt Disney Pictures (U.S.), 1928. Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks, dirs. Survival in Nature. Walt Disney Pictures (U.S.), 1956. Winston Hibler, dir. The Three Caballeros. Walt Disney Pictures (U.S.), 1944. Norman Ferguson, dir. The Three Little Pigs. Walt Disney Pictures (U.S.), 1933. Burt Gillett, dir. Treasure Island. RKO British Radio (U.K.) and Walt Disney Pictures (U.S.), 1950. Byron

Haskin, dir. ,

20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Walt Disney Pictures (U.S.), 1954. Richard Fleischer, dir. The Vanishing Prairie. Walt Disney Pictures (U.S.), 1954. James Algar, dir. Water Birds. Walt Disney Pictures (U.S.), 1952. James Algar, Ben Sharpsteen, dirs. Wednesday’s Child. RKO Pictures (U.S.), 1934. John S. Robertson, dir. White Wilderness. Walt Disney Pictures (U.S.), 1958. James Algar, dir. Why We Fight (series). U.S. Army Special Services Division (U.S.), 1943-1945. Frank

Capra, Anatole Litvak, dirs.

454 * FILMOGRAPHY

Index . Abbott, Grace, 94-95, 107, 121-22, 393 American Council on Education, 192-93

n.37 American Ideals (Roosevelt), 89-90

ABC network, 317-19, 353 American Library Association, 57 Academy Awards, 196-97, 202 The American People (Gorer), 210, 212-16 The Achieving Society (McClelland), 210 American Red Cross, 57

Adams, Grace, 186-87 Ames, Louise Bates, 182 } Addams, Jane, 81-82, 400 n.45; gov- Andrus, Ruth, 104 ernment connections, 94-95; role animation, 29, 126-29, 423 n.6; adult of movies, 42; uplift projects, 90, content, 118; combined with live

94-95, I21, 394-95 n.2, 395 n.8 action, 182, 248, 365; Disney's in-

| Adler, Alfred, 103 ventions, 28; metaphor for child Adorno, Theodor, 206, 208, 242, 354 rearing, 120, 126~28; metaphor for

Adventureland, 300, 305, 354 social engineering, 179-80; model The Adventures of Mr. Ichabod and for nature films, 238-39; natural

Mr. Toad, 324 representations of animals, 178advertising: children’s market, 420 82, 196-97, 226-27, 236-41, 4AII n.34; Communications research, n.56; study of human and animal 333-36, 350-52; effects research, 331- behavior, 127-29, 400 n.49 38, 382, 420 nn.35~-36; marketing anthropological views of American mass culture, 7, 34-37; market re- culture, 210, 212-16, 253-60, 303, 376 search, 241, 243, 331-36, 406n.4, 406 Anxious Parents (Stearns), 12

n.6; opinion research, 198-201; to Arbuckle, Fatty, 48, 50-52 parents, 129-34, 131f, 156-62, 157f, Arctic Village (Marshall), 140

167-72, 209f; youth market, 199- Arendt, Hannah, 206

2.00, 350-52, 406 nn.5-—6, 410 n.43, Aries, Phillipe, 11-12 |

420 11.34 | author function, 364-68

Advertising and Marketing to Young People = The Authoritarian Personality (Adorno

(Gilbert), 350 et al.), 206

187-89 207

Aldrich, C. Anderson and Mary M., “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” (Greenberg), Alice in Wonderland, 317, 320

American Character (Mead), 210, 212, 216, Babes in the Wood, 135

408 n.2I Babies are Human Beings (Aldrich and American Childhoods (Ilick), 12 Aldrich), 187-89

Baby Boomer generation, 231-32, 250- Calas, Elena, 257-60 } 52, 251f, 303. See also postwar era California Committee of National Bambi, 127-28, 178-81, 180f, 196, 238-39 Council of Catholic Women, 57

Bara, Theda, 46, 391 n.19 capitalist values. See democratic capital-

Baruch, Dorothy, 190 . ist values

Bear Country, 197, 315 Capra, Frank, 333 , Beard, Dan, 168 The Care and Feeding of Children (Holt), Beaver Valley, 197, 237, 239, 294-95, 311, 102, 156, 263

315 | Catholic Church: censoring of movies,

behaviorism: postwar rejection, 22, 250, 8, 69, 388 n.11; Motion Picture Pro254-57, 261-62, 266, 269-70, 274-77, duction Code, 57, 58-59, 388 n.11, 416 n.39; in scientific child-rearing, 392 n.28; Payne Fund research, 63 17, 103, 109, 152-59, 186-87, 252, 416 Catholic Legion of Decency, 44

| n.39; Soviet methods, 256-57 censorship. See regulation of the movie Benedict, Ruth, 19, 210, 212, 412n.6 industry Benjamin, Walter, 172 | Centuries of Childhood (Aries), 11-12

Berkeley Growth Study, 12.4 Chaplin, Charlie, 76 ,

Bernath, Maja, 273-75 Characteristically American (Perry), 210 Better Film Committee of Atlanta, 48 Charters, W. W., 73-74, 394 0.45

Betty Boop, 118 Chase, Stuart, 140 Binet-Simon Intelligence Tests, 149 Cheaper by the Dozen (Gilbreth), 147 Blackton, James Stewart, 29 Cheyenne, 344 | | Blatz, William, 33 , the child. See the generic child Blue Fairy, 32-33, 77-78 Child Care and Training (Faegre and

Blumer, Herbert, 68, 71 Anderson), 106 .

Boas, Franz, 19, 91-93, 218, 396 nn.15~16, child-centered approach to child- _ ,

412 1.6 | rearing, 17, 22; Freudian theory, Bott, Helen, 33 Club, 345-46; parents roles, 261Book of the Month Club, 216 288-92, 416 n.38; Mickey Mouse

Bourke-White, Margaret, 140 63, 273-79, 336-44; postwar era, .

Boy Scouts, 161, 375 260-64, 272-79, 336-44, 413-14 Boys in the Streets (Stelzle), 86-87 nn.17-20; before World War II, 187-

Bradbury, Ray, 355 94, 401 1.1, 405 N.41, 405 n.45. See “Bringing Up Baby on Books,” 262f, 265, also child-rearing, postwar era

288, 4s n.32 : child development, 18, 21-22; child- ,

Broken Toys, 119-20 rearing anxiety, 32~38; Child Study Brown, Wendy, 4-5, 387n.3 - movement, 96-104, 395 n.5; conBrumbaugh, Florence, 337 sumption of movies, 13-16, 110-15,

Bryson, Lyman, 297 130-34, 162-72; Darwinist views, | Brzezinski, Zbigniew, 207 | 97-99, 101-4, 131-32; data, 104-8, Buffalo Museum of Science, 313 148-50; Disney’s use of research,

Buhler, Charlotte, 104 15-16, 34-38: environmental facBuxbaum, Edith, 280-81 tors, 101-4, 122-23, 129-30; growth 456 * INDEX

studies, 124-26, 125f; mass mar- approach, 106-7, 152-59, 250, 252, keting, 26-27, 199-200, 406 n.5, 256-57, 362, 375, 416 n.39; social 406 n.6; middle-class baseline, 6-7, engineering, 177-80, 185-94; the 82-86, 95-96; national welfare con- whole child, 173, 182; wisdom and cerns, 105-6, II0-15, 132; “normal” common-sense, 106. See also child children, 66-67, 82-86, 95-96, 107, development

122-26, 125f, 132-33; parents’ per- child-rearing, postwar era, 222-26, | ceptions, 277; play, 279-81, 281~83f; 250-52; anthropological views, premature sophistication, 44-45; 210, 212-16, 253-60, 303, 376; au-

professionalization, 121-26; public tonomy development, 224-26, aspects, 158-62; scientific research, 409~10 nn.42-44; career develop-

80, 103-9; sexuality, 20, 265-70, ment for boys, 292; child-centered , 290-94; standardized testing, 149, approach, 260-64, 272-79, 336-44, 152, 233, 403 n.22. See also Pinocchio 362-63, 376-77, 413-14 nn.17-20; Childhood and Society (Erikson), 265-70, communications research, 333-36,

AI4 n.26 350-52; conformity, 222-26, 262,

Childhood in Contemporary Culture 271-72, 334-36; discipline, 272-

(Mead), 253-60, 412 n.9 79, 415 n.34; enculturation, 213-15, Childhood magazine, 96-97 271, 289-90, 362, 377-79, 410 N.43,

Child Life magazine, 82 412. n.6; Erikson’s composite boy, Child Management (Thom), 106, 122 265-79; evolution parallels, 374-76, child-rearing, before World War II, 379; fears of totalitarianism, 25380-86, 95-96, I02, 190-93, 388 n.9, 60; filarchy, 231-33, 232f, 410 n.48; 389 n.17; animation metaphor, 120, Frenkel-Brunswik’s “Karl,” 269-70, 126-28; anxiety, 32-38; behavior- 290; frontier metaphors, 294-99, is™m, 17, 103, 109, 186-87; career 3753 gendered VIEWS, 251, 285-94, preparation, 155-56; child-centered 416 nn.40-41; the generic child, 241approach, 187-94, 401 N.1, 405 n.4I, 42; learning self-control, 271-85;

405 n.45; child labor, 153-54, 183, maternal aptitudes of girls, 292379 nn.18-19, 424 n.18; Child Study 93; Mead’s enculturation, 253-60, movement, 96-104, 395 n.5; con- 412 n.6; Mead’s reaction formation,

formity, 172-75, 192-93; data on 220; middle class norms, 336; momdevelopment, 104~8, 148-50; evolu- ism, 267-68; national implications, tion parallels, 374-76; leisure time, 251-52, 255, 259-60, 263, 284, 413 154-55; Magazines, 14-15, 130; man- n.10, 414 n.21; the natural child, 252, agement and efficiency, 105-9, 137, 259-60, 412 n.8; nature and culture 152-59, 398 n.33; normal” children, link, 243-44, 299, 301-3, 307-8, 324, 66-67, 107, 122-26, 125f, 132-33, 328-29, 344-56, 424 N.21; parents 137-38; parents’ roles, 107-9; prod- as gender models, 290-94; play, uct desirability, 167-72; productive 279-81, 281-83f; rejection of beconsumption, 184-85, 193-94; Pro- haviorism, 22, 254-57, 261-62, 266, gressive reform movement, 81-96, . 269-70, 274-77, 416 1.39; research, I2I, 123, 394-95 nn.1-2; scientific 415 N.31; sexuality, 291-94; social en-

INDEX * 457

_ child-rearing, postwar era (continued ) 335-36; fears of totalitarianism, 253vironments at home, 340-42; Soviet 60; implications for child-rearing, _ practices, 257-60, 413 N.10; Spock's 251, 253-60, 263, 413 N.10, 413 nn.13-

child-centered views, 260-64, 272- 14, 414 n.21; mass consumption, 79, 413-14 nn.17-20; television, 207-8; science, 236; True Life Ad329-36, 336-44, 420 nn.35-36; youth ventures, 226-27. market, 199-200, 350-52, 406 n.5, Colman, Ronald, 76

406 N.6, 410 N.43 Columbine High School mass murders,

children. See the generic child I-2, 358, 360 |

Children of the City (Nasaw), 11 “The Coming International Brain Race”

Children’s Attendance at Motion Pictures (Hecht), 259-60 _

(Dale), 68-69 Coming of Age in Samoa (Mead), 253-54 | Children’s Bureau, 415 n.35; dissemi- Committee on Public Information nation of information, 107, 121-22, (CPI), 47-48 192, 399 n.40; establishment, 94-95 commodification of the child, 357-72 Children’s Sleep (Renshaw, Miller,and © commodity fetishism, 363, 370-71,

Marquis), 65-66 381-85 | }

“Child-Training Ideals in Soviet Russia,” | Common Sense Book of Baby and Child

257-60 | Care (Spock), 260-64, 272-75

The China Shop, 36f communications research, 331-36, 350Christian Century, 74, 113 52. See also advertising » Churchill, Douglas, 29-31 communism. See Cold War; Soviet

, Cinderella, 18, 304, 417 n.3 Union , : ' class factors, 1-3, 6-8, 17-18; Child consumption. See economic factors;

Study movement, 96-104; class productive consumption struggles, 145; early film culture, The Content of Motion Pictures (Payne

39-47, 168; enculturation, 377-78; Fund), 62-63 © ° establishment of normative data, — Coogan, Jackie, 46

124-26; immigration, 18, 22-23, Cravens, Hamilton, 95, 133 . | 37, 41-43, 45-46, 72-73, 78; impact Crowther, Bosley,240 . of movies on children, 8-10, 37- culture. See mass culture

. 38, 162-72, 404 n.33; in Middletown, | . | 144-46, movie regulations, 8-10; Dale, Edgar, 68-69, 73-74, III, 136

negative mobility, 71; postwar con- Darwin, Charles, 412n.8 |

| formity, 218-19, 241; self-reflexivity, Davis, Kingsley, 81, 83, 395 n.4 |

139, 197-201, 216-17, 225-26, 336, Davis, Marc, 127-28 | AOI n.5, 406-7 n.7; working-class Davy Crockett, 323, 323f, 327, 335

culture, 18, 41-43, 45-46, 78, 145, Decatur study, 198 | 163-64, 406-7 n.7. See also middle deCordova, Richard, 32, 35, 55, 73, 164

class : | , Deep South (Davis, Gardner, and GardCold War, 196-98, 203; anxiety, 203, ner), 140 , 226-27, 236; communications re- definition of the generic child, 2-6 search, 331-36; fears of conformity, democratic capitalist values, 22-23, 26, |

, 458 * INDEX

380-82; commodity fetishism, 363, on Snow White, 116, 117; television 370-71, 381-85; Fordism at Disney, introductions, 317, 320, 353; Yen 27-28, 116-20, 133-36. See also man- Sid, 175-78. See also Walt Disney

agement and efficiency; middle Productions

class Disneyland (park), 19, 21, 300-303, 302f, demographics: baby boomer genera- 353-54, 418 n.16; Main St., U.S.A., tion, 250-52, 251f, 303; television 301, 302f; performers, 356; promo-

viewing, 329 tion, 316-17; themes, 301, 302f, 417 Denney, Reuel, 211-12. See also The n.4

Lonely Crowd Disneyland (television program), 197, Depression era: middle class anxiety, 244~45, 294, 305, 316—29; audience, 136-37, 185; productivity at Disney, 322; duration, 317; financial success, 135-36; youth, 81, 83, 86-96. See also 321-22; format, 322-23, 418 n.22: child-rearing before World War II infomercial-style promotion, 317-

Dewey, John, 99 21, 323-24, 323f; Look Magazine Tv Dialectic of Enlightenment (Horkheimer Award for Best Children’s Series,

and Adorno), 242 419~20; nature and culture link, “Different Patterns of Social Outlook 301-3, 307-8, 324; Opening, 320; re-

and Personality in Family and Chil- cycling of programs, 322-23; reviews, , dren” (Frenkel-Brunswik), 269-70 320-21, 324; teachers’ guides, 318f,

Disney, Roy, 317, 411-12 n.1 324-28, 325f; theming, 319-20, 328 Disney, Walter Elias, 25-32; anima- Dixon, C. Madeleine, 191-92, 405 n.52 tion skills, 28-29; author function, Donald Duck, 126; postwar themes of 364-68; awards and testimonials, | child-rearing, 248-50, 252, 419 n.32; 35-37, 36f, 352, 422 n.58; biographi- sexuality, 20, 365 cal information, 18, 30-31, 178-79, Donzelot, Jacques, 359

353, 365-66; Bradbury’s views, 355; Dulles, Foster, 334-35 , commodification, 15-16, 21, 25~32, Dumbo, 18, 127, 178, 196, 423 0.5 79-80, 364-74, 380-82; as com-

modity fetish, 381-82; Disneyland economic factors: child labor, 94-95, opening, 320; early filmmaking, 183, 397 nN.18-19, 424 n.18; con52-53; as embodiment of company, sumption of Disney products, 74-76, 380-82; legends, 25-26; man- 84-86; poor and unemployed youth,

agement skills, 28-30; as Mickey 81, 86-96; postwar consumption, Mouse, 28, 75-76, 365, 381; natu- 198-201, 207-8, 209f; productive ral child-rearing advice, 286-89; consumption, 138-39, 150, 184Parents’ Magazine award, 352, 422 85, 193-94, 401 n.3; youth market, n.58; persona as folk scientist, 306-7, 199-200, 350-52, 406 nn.5-6, 410 |

315-16, 320, 327; persona as man- n.43 agement expert, 10, 12-14, 18, 74-75, | education: efficiency and empiricism,

138, 244; persona as parent figure to 151-52; of immigrants, 89-91; workers, 118-20; persona as Santa, middle class models, 82, 83f; in 135-36; rags-to-riches themes, 74-75; Middletown (Lynd and Lynd), 151

) INDEX * 459

education (continued ) Fortune magazine, 235 . — -54, 402-3 n.18, 403 n.22; postwar Foucault, Michel, 364-68

| era, 233; scientific study of chil- Foundation Stones for Success, 152 dren, 128, 400 n.51; socialization of Fox, William, 44-45, 53 children, 231-33, 232f, 410-11 n.50; Frenkel-Brunswick, Else, 255-56, 269-70 standardized testing, 233, 361, 410 Freud, Anna, 19, 265, 289

n.49 Freud, Sigmund, 19

educational programming, 21, 327, 344; Freudian theory, 19, 179, 405 0.45;

promotional materials, 313, 318f; , American character, 213-16, 2.43, teachers’ guides, 324-26, 325f, 346- 409 1.26; bourgeois narcissism, 47, 352-53, 419 nN.27-28, 419 n.30. 376-77; child-centered approach,

See also True Life Adventures 187-88, 288-92, 376-77, 416 n.38, efficiency. See management and efh- 42.4 n.22; childhood sexuality, 265,

ciency . 268-69, 288-92, 416 n.38; humani-

Eisner, Michael, 418 n.22 zation of management, 210; male

Eliot, T. S., 208 role models, 214-15; Mead’s enEllwood, Charles, 93-94, 396 n.16 culturation model, 254; parental

Emile (Rousseau), 10-11, 374, 387 n.4 expectations, 410 n.48; stages of The Emotional Responses of Children to the development, 370

Motion Picture Situation (Dysinger Friedrich, Carl, 207 |

and Ruckmick), 65-68 Fromm, Erich, 206-7, 409 n.26

Engestrom, Yrjo, 371

Encyclopedia Britannica, 82, 83f Frontierland, 300, 305, 354 Erikson, Erik, 223, 254, 264-70, 412 n.9, Garrity, William, 28

414 1.23, 414 1.26 gender factors, 17-18, 288-94, 416 | ethnicity. See immigration; racial and nn.40-4I; career narratives, 292-93,

ethnic factors 348; childhood sexuality, 20, 265-70, _ Everyday Problems of the Everyday Child 288-92, 416 n.38; domestic sphere,

(Thom), 105, 122 397 n.20; Erikson’s composite boy, Exhibitor’s Bulletin, 44-45 265-69; Mead’s views, 412 n.6; True Life Adventures, 285-87, 415-16 n.37

Fairbanks, Douglas, 53, 76, 391 n.19 General Federation of Women’s Clubs,

Fantasyland, 300, 354 57

Federal Council of Churches, 63 | Generation of Vipers (Wylie), 268

Fidler, Jimmy, 310 the generic child, 2-6, 13-18, 387.4, 423 First Berkeley Growth Study, 124 n.15; assimilation of popular culture, Fisher, Dorothy Canfield, 110 | 7-8, 37-38, 41-43, 82-86; benefits

Flower, B. O., 96 of movies, 43-44; 52-55, 59-62, 392 Flowers and Trees, 28 | n.26; child labor laws, 94, 183, 373,

Ford, John, 296 397 nn.18-19, 424 n.18; child-rearing Ford Omnibus (television program), 317 anxiety, 32-38; children’s matinees,

Forman, Henry James, 63-66, 69, 393 48, 54-55, 56, 63-64, 168-69; Com- | NN.33-34, 393 N.40, 394n.44 modification through consumption, 460 * INDEX

357-74; commodity fetishism, 363, The Guidance of Mental Growth in Infant

370-71, 381-85; media effects, 382- and Child (Gesell), 104 85: middle class models of American

values, 82-86; movie attendance Haber, Samuel, 105 rates, 63-64; Payne Fund research, Hall, G. Stanley, 6, 97, 99, 187, 254, 398 62-72, 393 1.36, 394 nN. 42; in postwar n.3I culture, 241-42; public education, Hanawalt, Barbara, 11

373: risks of movies and mass cul- Harris, Eric, 1-2 ture, 18, 37, 48, 52, 59, 62-72; role in Harris, Joel Chandler, 350

America’s future, 360-63, 366-67. Hart, William S., 296 See also child development; parents Hawks, Howard, 296

Gepetto, 33, 77-78, 377-78 Hays, Will, 49-50, 51f, 52, 59, 164

Gerbner, George, 359 Hays Office. See Motion Picture ProGesell, Arnold, 6, 129, 187, 415 n.32; child ducers and Distributors of America research facility, 103-4; child-rearing (MPPDA)

literature, 107; developmental Hecht, George, 250-52, 259-60

philosophy, 106, 413 n.16 Hibler, Winston, 202-3 Getting Ideas from the Movies (Stoddard The Hidden Persuaders (Packard), 200

and Holaday), 70 histories of childhood, 10-13 :

Gilbert, Eugene, 350 Holaday, Perry, 70 Gilbreth, Frank, 106, 147 Hollister, Paul, 31

Gilbreth, Lillian, 19, 106, 139, 407 n.19; Hollywood Pictures, 387 n.2 child-rearing, 107, 154-55, 174, 405 Holt, Luther Emmett, 102, 156, 263 n.41; home efficiency, 105, 147-55, The Home-Maker and Her Job (Gilbreth), 398 n.33, 403 N.2I, 404 N.27, 405 N. 41 105, 139, 147-49, 148f Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, 89, 92f, 93, home management: efficiency, 105,

105, 395 n.8, 396 n.16 139, 146-50, 398 n.33, 403 NN.24-25; Glazer, Nathan, 211-12. See also The self-reflexivity, 197-201

Lonely Crowd Home Town (Anderson), 140 Glynn, Eugene David, 338-39 Honest John Foulfellow, 33

Goldwyn, Samuel, 46, 53 Hoover, Herbert, 404 n.27 Good Housekeeping, 111-12 Hopper, Hedda, 319, 322 Gorer, Geoffrey, 22, 210, 212-16, 230, Horkheimer, Max, 208, 242

2.43, 408 n.22 House Un-American Activities Com“Grasshopper and the Ants,” 171 mittee, 197

Great Depression. See Depression era Hovland, Carl, 333-34 : The Great Train Robbery, 296 “How Baby Care Has Changed” (Ber-

Greenberg, Clement, 207 nath), 273-75

. | Gross, Larry, 359 Howdy Doody show, 344

walt), 11 III, 136

Growing Up in Medieval London (Hana- How to Appreciate Motion Pictures (Dale),

Gruenberg, Sidonie Masters, 274 Hulbert, Anne, 12 Grundrisse (Marx), 368-69, 373, 423 0.13 Hull House, 90, 94-95, 395-96 n.10

INDEX * 46!

The Human Problems of Industrial Civili- Kelley, Florence, 42, 81-82, 95, 394-95

gation (Mayo), 210, 407 n.18 n.2,395n.8 .

Klebold, Dylan, 1-2 , Illick, Joseph, 12 oo Kuhn, Thomas, 21-22 |

Ilyenkov, Evald, 371 ,

immigration, 18, 22-23, 37, 78; anti- Ladies’ Home Journal, 30, 111-12, 130

immigration efforts, 45-46, 91-94, . Lampwick, 77 : ,

, 92f; assimilation goals, 7-8, 37-38, _ Lassie, 344 41-43, 84-86, 89-90, 94, 399.37, —- Lathrop, Julia, 94-95 |

42.4 N.19; Boas’s anthropometric | Latour, Bruno, 369 | changes, 91-93; class struggles, 145; Lazarsfeld, Paul, 198

construct of the generic child, 72- lemming society, 203-5 , 73; employment options, 137; Pro- “Let’s Get Rid of Tele-Violence” (Whar-

gressive reform movement, 81-96, ton), 339

406-7 n.7 | 173, 182 Oo | “I’m No Fool,” 349f | The Littlest Outlaw, 350 Le 102, 394-95 nn.1-2; self-reflexivity, Littledale, Clara Savage, 132, 149-50,

Individualism Reconsidered (Riesman), , The Living Desert, 197, 226-27, 286, 310,

216, 218, 408-9 n.25 313-15, 324, 406 N.I | inner-directed personalities, 217 Living with Our Children (Gilbreth), 139,

Institute for Social Research, 139-40 398 0.33 , | Institute of Child Welfare, University of | Lloyd, David, 377-78, 383,385

California, 269-70 : Locke, John, 6, 387 n.4, 398 n.29 Institute of Child Welfare, University of ‘The Lonely Crowd (Riesman, Denney,

Minnesota, 106,107,108 and Glazer), 7-8, 215-26, 235, 409 “International Newsreel,” 347 a n.26; conformity, 211-12; FreudAn Inventory of the Habits of Children from ian theory, 409 n.26; suburban life,

Two to Five Years of Age (Andrus), 203-4, 296-97 a

106 Look Magazine tv Award for Best Chillowa Research Station, 106,107. dren’s Series, 419-20n.33 “I Stopped Spanking... WhenI Found _ Lukacs, Gydrgy, 371, 423 n.1o | Out Why I Did It” (Meek), 278 Lynd, Helen and Robert, 18-19, 21,

Iwerks, Ub, 28 , 135-94, 198, 402 n.16. See also

James,

8 Middletown | | William, 99 | | .

:,

Jiminy Cricket, 33, 77-78, 347-48, 3409f, MacDonald, Dwight, 207-8, 236, 243, _ ,

378 - 354, 407 1.14, 407 0.17 |

J. Walter Thompson advertising agency, Magic Highway U.S.A., 303.

198-99, 406 n.4 : The Magic Kingdom (Watts), J2-I3

, | OO Maltby, Richard, 9, 39, 164 Oo |

Katz, Elihu, 198 _ Maltin, Leonard, 31

Keep Them Human (Dixon), 191-92, 405 management and efficiency, 18-22, 136-

n.52. | | 39; anxiety, 136-37, 156-62, 185;

462 * INDEX ,

child-rearing, 105-9, 137, 152-59, Mayo, Elton, 189-90, 210, 229, 407-8

398 n.33; Corporate wives, 235, 4II nn.18-19 n.51; in education, 150-52; Fantasia’s McCall’s Magazine, 75-76, 111-12. See also

“Sorcerer's Apprentice,” 175-78; Payne Fund Studies home efficiency, 105, 139, 146-50, McCarthy, Joseph, 197 398 n.33, 403 nn.24-25; normaliza- McCay, Winsor, 29 tion of American culture, 137-39; McClellan, George, 40 predictive testing, 200-201, 230, Mead, Margaret, 19, 216, 264, 414 n.23;

2.43; preparation of children for cultural evolution of children, 212managerial roles, 155-56; productive 13, 253-60, 408 n.21, 412 n.9; culture consumption, 138-39, 150, 157-62, and personality school, 210, 2.43;

184-85, 401 n.3; at Walt Disney reaction formation, 220; Samoan Productions, 18-21, 27-28, 115-20, - studies, 253-54, 412 n.6; Soviet

133-34, 399 nn. 41-43. See also social child-rearing practices, 257-60 |

engineering media effects, 5, 357-60, 382-85, 420 Man and the Moon, 327 nn.35~36; parental regulation, 359; The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit (Wil- research, 329-44, 355; violence, 1-

son), 216, 235, 302 2, 339-40, 358-60, 382-83. See also Marxist theory: commodification Payne Fund Studies; television through consumption, 360-72, 381, Meek, Lois, ra5f 423 n.8, 423 n.13; leisure time, 373; “The Mental Development of a Child”

nature of social change, 384 (Moore), 99-101 mass culture, 6-10, 374-79; assimilation Merrie Melodies, 118

goals, 7-8, 37-38, 45-46; benefits Merton, Robert, 354-55 | of consumption, 110-15, 130-34; Methodism. See Protestant churches centralization, 138-39; child-safe methodology, 17-24 consumption, 110-15; communica- Mickey Mouse, 20; annual film produc-

tions research, 333-36; constructions tion, 27, 135, 412 N.3; associations | of the child, 13-16, 26-27; consum- with prewar culture, 249-50; comerism based on children, 82-86, 95; munity presence, 165-69; as cultural Depression era, 159-72; marketing, icon, 247-48; Disneyland opening, 7, 34-37; in postwar life, 195-96, 320; Disney's voice, 28, 365, 381; 205-15, 222, 231-33, 232f, 241-46, Fantasia’s “Sorcerer's Apprentice,” 407 N.14, 407-9 nn.17-27; postwar 175-78; international presence, studies of consumption, 198-201; 248; moral issues, 75; promotional productive consumption, 138-39, products, 35; twenty-first birthday, 184-85, 193-94, 401 n.3; radio, 162; 247-50, 252 regulation and censorship, 8-10, MICKEY MOUSE CLUB BOOK CLUB, 350 47-56; risks to children, 18, 37, 48, Mickey Mouse Club Bulletin, 167

52; totalitarianism, 19-20, 22, 196- Mickey Mouse Club (television program), 98, 203, 206-8. See also advertising; 20, 165-66, 344-54, 404 n.35; child-

movies; television centered approach, 345-46; club May, Mark, 67-68, 393 n.40 membership, 350-52; format, 346INDEX * 463

Mickey Mouse Club (continued) consumption, 138-39, 150, 157-62, 49; gendered career narratives, 184-85, 401 n.3; racial and ethnic

. 348; Jimmy and Roy, 345-46; na- factors, 142-44, 402 N.14, 402 N.16; ture and culture link, 344-54, 419 research funding, 139-40; research n.32; Nielsen ratings, 348; product methodology, 140-44, 401-2 nn.10promotion, 348-53, 351f, 422 n.56; II, 402 1.13, 403 nn.24-25; social teachers’ guides, 324-28, 325f, 419 engineering, 172-75, 183-85 nn.27-28, 419 n.30; themes, 344-45 Middletown in Transition (Lynd and Mickey Mouse Magazine, 167-68, 167f, 404 | Lynd), 138, 140, 141, 159-61, 210; con-

, n.36 formity, 174-75; racial and ethnic middle class: anxiety, 136-37, 157-58, factors, 143f, 402 N.14, 402 n.16 185; baseline for normalcy, 39, 46- Mills, C. Wright, 22, 242.

| 47, 77-79, 84-86, 95-96, 131-32, Minnesota Multiphasic Personality 141-44, 336, 395 1.7, 402 N.17, 423- Index (MMPI), 200 | 24 nn.15-16; democratic capitalist Mitman, Gregg, 244

, values, 22-23, 26, 27-28, 116-20, Mix, Tom, 296 363, 370-71, 380-85; Depression era Moley, Raymond, 47-48, 391-92.N.23 movies, 162-72; enculturation, 377- “Monsters and Muppets” (Mukerji), 12

78, 412 0.6; individualism, 79-80, Montaigne, 6, 387.4 145; interstate highway system, 206, Moore, Kathleen Carter, 99-101

407 n.13; managerial roles, 200- mothers. See parents | 201, 216; in Middletown, 144-46; Motion Picture and the Family, 59, 60-61f

opinion research, 198-201 ; post- Motion Picture Herald, 44 | war child-rearing, 255-56; postwar Motion Picture Producers and Distribuconformity, 196, 204-5, 211-35; tors of America (MPPDA), 417 0.5; postwar culture, 195-246, 241-46; censorship, 47-52, 51f; children’s self-reflexivity, 139, 336, 401 n.5, matinee program, 54-55, 56, 168-

. ‘406-7 0.7; sociology of American 69; classic library, 72, 394 n.45, 404 culture, 210-35; suburban life, 2o01- n.34; Motion Picture and the Family,

5; values, 37-47, 84-86; Whyte’s ) 59, 60-61f; self-regulation, 56-62 , belongingness, 234-35. See also Motion Picture Production Code, 9, |

postwar era 56-62, 164, 392 N.26, 417 n.5; Civic Middletown (Lynd and Lynd), 7-8, 18- group involvement, 57-60, 388 n.11, 19, 21, 135-94, 198, 409 n.26; child 392 n.28; Payne Fund research, 72labor, 153-54, 183; class relations, 73; preamble, 58; public relations 144-46, 404 n.33; depictions of nor- aspects, 56-57 malcy, 145-46; education, 151-54, Motion Picture Research Council, 72. 402-3 n.18, 403 n.22; group mem- Motion Pictures and Social Attitudes of

bership, 161-62; magazine reading, Children (Peterson and Thurstone), -

155-56; management and efficiency 393 n.39 | |

techniques, 150-62, 403 nn.24- Motion Pictures in Religious and Educa-

25; movies, 162-72; productive tional Work, 42,391 n.16 ©

4644 * INDEX:

Motion Picture Standards of Morality National Board of Censorship, 40-41, ,

(Peters), 76 391 n.12

“Movie Madness” (Forman), 63-66, 64f | National Board of Review of Motion | movies: anti-Semitism, 46-47, 392 n.30; Pictures, 40-41, 391 n.12 assimilation goals, 7-8, 37-38, 45- National Council of Jewish Women, 57 47; attendance rates, 63-64; benefits | National Council of Teachers of En-

for children, 43-44, 52-55, 59, 392 glish, 57 n.26; children’s matinees, 48, 54- National Society of Daughters of the

55, 56, 63-64, 168-69; child-safe American Revolution, 57-58 consumption, I10-I5, 118, 165-69, Native American portrayals, 295-96 184-85; classic library, 72, 394 n.45, nature: frontier metaphors, 295-303,

404 n.34; Depression era, 135-36, 316, 375; link with culture, 243-44, , 162-72; early social impact, 38- 299, 301-3, 307-8, 324, 328-29, 34447; escapism, 170-71; ethnic and 56, 424 n.21; morality, 201-2; in working-class roots, 18, 37-38, 46- postwar culture, 195-97, 225-26, 412 48, 78, 391 n.22; genres, 163-64, 404 n.8; in postwar era child-rearing, n.34; moral considerations, 75-76; 252, 259-60, 412 n.8 moral uplift goals, 41-43, 46-47, nature documentaries. See True Life

78; promotion and public relations, Adventures 44-45, 54-55; regulation and cen- “The Nature of Things,” 347-48, 349f sorship, 8-10, 39-42, 47-56; risks for | Nature’s Half Acre, 197, 239, 309-10, 313-15 children, 18, 37, 48, 52, 59, 62-72, 404 Newsweek magazine, 262f, 265, 288, 305,

n.33; social content, 39, 41-47; so- AI5 N.32 cial spaces, 39-41; social uplift role, The Next America: Prophecy and Faith

164-65; westerns, 296, 417 N.44. (Bryson), 210, 297 See also animation; Walt Disney normalized depictions of American

Productions life: anxiety, 157-58, 185; centralized Movies and Conduct (Blumer), 71 , mass culture, 138-39; child developMovies, Delinquency, and Crime (Blumer ment and child-rearing, 66-67, 107, ©

and Hauser), 71, 393 0.35 122-26, 125f, 132-33, 137-38, 185-94,

Moving Picture World, 42 403 n.22; group membership, 161MPpDA. See Motion Picture Producers 62; middle class baseline, 39, 46-47,

and Distributors of America 77-79, 84-86, 95-96, 131-32, I4I-

(MPPDA) A4, 336, 395 N.7, 402 n.17; racial and Mukerji, Chandra, 12 ethnic factors, 124-26, 137. See also Muncie, Indiana, 138, 140, 194; middle Middletown class culture, 144-46; segregation,

142-44, 143f. See also Middletown Ogburn, Charles, 7 Ohio State Bureau of Juvenile Research,

Nasaw, David, 11, 45 66

National Association of Radio and The Old Mill, 28 Television Broadcasters, 320 The Olympic Elk, 197

INDEX * 465

One Hour in Wonderland, 317 self-reflexivity, 197-201, 225-26. See opinion research, 198-201. See also also child-rearing; gender factors

advertising Parents’ Association of America, 96-97 The Organization Man (Whyte), 8, 211- Parents’ Magazine, 14, 129, 130; adver-

12, 215, 227-35, 232f, 410 n.46 tising, 157f, 209f; on anxiety, 131f; The Origins of Totalitarianism (Arendt), award to Walt Disney, 352, 422 n.58;

206 board of advisors, 107; child-rearing ,

Ortega y Gasset, Jose, 208 literature, 33, 148-50, 286-90; the © other-directed personalities, 217-26, 235, children’s decade, 250-52, 251f;

271 on developmental milestones, 413

Our Friend the Atom, 21, 303 n.17; on discipline, 288; Disney’s Our Movie Made Children (Forman), child-rearing advice, 286-89; on

63-66, 69, 393 1.34 enculturation of children, 289-90; Outdoor Life, 179-81, 180f Encyclopedia Britannica, 82, 83f;

| guides to movies, 74, 111-13, 114f,

_ Packard, Vance, 200, 242 164-65, 304, 399 nn.39-40; on home , parents: anxiety, 129-34, 131f, 156-62, efficiency, 160f; medal of honor 157f, 185, 221-22, 377-78; child- winners, 113; national welfare concentered approach, 261-63, 273-79, cerns, 132; Payne Fund research, 336-44; as child development re- 69-72; on play, 280-81, 281-83f; on searchers, 96, 98-104, 148-49, 152; popularity, 398-99 n.36; On postwar childhood sexuality, 265-70, 291- brain race, 259-60; reading groups, 94; child-rearing responsibilities, 152; rejection of behaviorism, 274107-9, 126-34, 158-62, 167-68, 178, 77; reviews of Disney products, 324, 193-94, 398 n.35; discipline, 273-79, 350-52; Spock’s articles, 273-84,

| 415 n.34; Erikson’s composite boy, 412 0.4, 413 n.17; teachers’ guide, 265-69; family-friendly movies, 73- 352-53; on tele-violence, 339-40 75; filarchy, 231-33, 232f, 410 n.48; Park, Robert, 7, 391 n.17 | home environments, 123-24; male Payne Fund Studies, 60, 62-74, 359,

role models, 214-15; management 392-94 nn.32-45; ambiguous reand efficiency techniques, 105-9, sults, 68-70, 393 n.40; assumptions 123-26, 147-50, 152-59, 398 n.33; about “normalcy,” 66-67; Chilmonitoring of film viewing, 52-55, dren’s Attendance at Motion Pictures, .

65, 79; monitoring of mass media 68-69; Children’s Sleep, 65-66; The exposure, II0-I5, 112, 164-67, 359, Emotional Responses of Children to 399 nn.39-40; monitoring of tele- the Motion Picture Situation, 65vision viewing, 336-44; mothers 68; family friendly movies, 73-75; and television viewing, 339, 342-43; Getting Ideas from the Movies, 70; performing gender roles, 290-94; How to Appreciate Motion Pictures,

personal growth, 276-79, 281-84; III, 136; influence on Disney Propostwar enculturation, 219-22, 243- _ductions, 73-76; Motion Pictures 44, 257-60; self-education, 72-73; and Social Attitudes of Children, 393

466 * INDEX

n.39; movie attendance rates, 63- 212-16, 252-60; belongingness, 64; movie selection, 111; Movies and 234-35, 409 n.42; birth rate, 410 Conduct, 71; Movies, Delinquency, n.47; classlessness, 231-33; coldand Crime, 71, 393 n.35; negative War anxiety, 203, 226-27, 236, 414 effects of movies, 62-70, 392 n.32, n.21; community presence of Walt 393 nn.39-40; The Social Conduct and Disney Productions, 312-16; conforAttitudes of Movie Fans, 67-68, 393 Mity, 196, 204-5, 211-12, 215-35, 302-

n.40 3, 334-36, 411 n.52; consumption

Peck’s Bad Boy, 46 habits, 198-201, 335; enculturation People and Places series, 327 of children, 213-15, 409-10 nn.42-

People of Plenty (Potter), 210 44; fears of totalitarianism, 196-98, , Personality and Cultural Pattern (Plant), 2.03, 206-8, 216, 223, 253-60, 298,

210 | 335, 362-63, 413 N.10, 413 NN.13-14;

personality testing, 200-201, 230, 243 filarchy, 231-33, 232f, 410 n.48; indi-

Peter Pan, 317, 423 1.5 vidualism, 208; naturalism, 225-26, | Peters, Charles, 76 2.43-46; nature and culture link, The Phantom of the Opera, 64 196-97, 299, 301-3, 307-8, 324, 328Photoplay, 44, 46; industry regulation 29, 344-56, 424 n.21; new American and censorship, 49-50, 51f; letters, culture, 205-15, 241-46, 407 n.14,

54-56, 392 0.26 407—9 nn.17-27; other-directedness, Piaget, Jean, 123, 187, 370, 413 n.16 217-26, 235, 241; Riesman’s cultural

Pickford, Mary, 53, 76, 391 n.19 autonomy, 223-25, 235, 241-42,

Pietz, William, 370-71, 381 409-10 nn. 41-44; self-reflexivity, Pinocchio, 18, 77-86, 377-79; assimilation 197-201, 216-17, 225-26; studies of of middle-class virtues, 84-85; boys American culture, 210-35; Whyte’s

of Pleasure Island, 77-78, 81, 86; Social Ethic, 228-35. See also childchild-rearing anxiety, 32-36, 71; class rearing, postwar era; suburban life; and racial aspects, 77-78, 113-14; television; True Life Adventures generational succession theme, 178; The Power Elite (Mills), 242 Parents’ Magazine medal of honor, Preface to Peasantry (Raper), 140 _- 1133 promotional products, 34-36, Pricing the Priceless Child (Zelizer), 11

35f; reviews, 34, 36f Pringle, Henry F., 75-76 Plainville (Withers), 140 Printers’ Ink, 199 Plant, James, 210 productive consumption, 138-39, 150, play, 279-81, 281-83f 157-62, 184-85, 193-94, 401 n.3 The Pocket Book of Baby and Child Care Progressive reform movement, 42, 46,

(Spock), 413 1.17 374, 391 0.17, 395-96 n.10; assimilapopular culture. See mass culture tion goals, 81-82, 87-88, 424 n.19;

Porter, Edwin S., 296 child-saving projects, 81, 86-96, postwar era, 195-246; advertising and 121, 400 n.45; Darwinist views, 102,

opinion research, 198-201, 242, 394-95 n.2; Hull House, 90, 94-95, 333-36; anthropological views, 395-96 n.10; middle-class baseline,

INDEX * 467

Progressive reform movement (cont.) tional Board of Censorship, 40 -Al, 84-86; urban uplift programs, 88- 391 n.12; Walt Disney Productions, 91, 88f, 102, 121, 123, 394-95 nn.1-2, 76

395 n.8 religious factors. See Catholic Church;

140 . churches | :

The Proper Study of Mankind (Chase), Jewish aspects of movies; Protestant

Protestant churches, 37; on the benefits The Reluctant Dragon, 317 © of movies, 42; middle-class baseline, research, 6-8, 415 n.35; child research 39, 46-47, 305 n.7; Motion Picture facilities, 103-9; communications —

| Production Code, 392 n.28; movie research, 331-36, 350-52; Disney’s reform, 8; Payne Fund research, 63 . use of, 15-16, 34-38, 76; empha-

Prowlers of the Everglades, 197 sis on efficiency, 105~9, 398 n.33; Psychological Care of Infant and Child hypnographs, 65-66; media effects

| (Watson), 106, 109 research, 329-44, 382, 420 nn.35The Psychological Review, 99 36; for Middletown, 139-44, 401-2 nNn.IO-I1, 402 N.13, 403 nn.24-25;

Quigley, Martin, 58-59 opinion research, 198-201; parents’

Quirk, James, 49-50 role, 96, 98-104, 148-49, 152; Payne | Fund Studies, 60, 62~74; postwar

racial and ethnic factors, 7, 17-18; anti- child-rearing, 415 n.31; sampling,

Semitism, 47, 392 n.30; assimilation 124, 142—44, 402 n.13; Wechsler ,

goals of popular culture, 7-8, 37- psychogalvanograph, 66, 67f : | 38, 41-43, 45-46; attacks on mo- | Richardson, F. H., 148 -149 tion picture industry, 47; Boas’s Riesman, David, 19, 243, 264; on adver-

anthropometric changes, 91-93; tising, 410 n.43; on autonomy, 223child labor laws, 424 n.18; establish- 25, 235, 241-42; on child-centered

ment of normative data, 124-26, . approach, 284, 342; on conformity, 137; eugenics, 91-93, 92f, 398 N.31; 21I-I2, 215-26, 271, 408-9 nn.25-27, immigrant culture, 18, 22-23, 72-73, 409 n.29, 409 nn.35-36; on middle91-94, 92f, 137; impact of movies on class self-reflexivity, 199; studies of children, 8-10, 23; middle class base- childhood, 412 n.9; on suburbia, line, 396 n.16; middle-class baseline, 203-4, 296

39, 82-86, 95-96, 391 nN.17-19, 395 Riis, Jacob, 81-82 n.7; in Middletown, 142-44; movie Rivers, W. H. R., 140 stars, 46, 391 n.19; postwar con- Rockefeller, John D., 139 formity, 218-19, 241; race suicide Roosevelt, Theodore, 88-90, 375, 394-95

concerns, 91-94, 92f; vaudeville, 46 n.2 Raising America (Hulbert), 12 Rorschach ink blot test, 124, 200 Reader’s Subscription Book Club, 216, Rorty, James, 69-72, 394.44

409 0.26 . The Rotarian, 74,113 |

regulation of the movie industry, 8- Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 6, 10-11, 374, 10, 39-41, 47-56, 358-60; Catholic 387 n.4, 398 n.29, 412 n.8 Church, 8, 69, 388 n.11, 392.28; Na- The Roy Rogers Show, 344 | 4648 * INDEX

Sahlins, Marshall, 131f Smoodin, Eric, 12, 31-32, 182, 248-49,

Saludos Amigos, 2.48, 365 311

The Sane Society (Fromm), 206-7 Smythe, Dallas, 336-37

Sanger, Margaret, 92f Snow White, 115-19, 417 n.3; advertisSanta’s Workshop, 135-36 ing campaign, 169-70, 170f; Fordist

Schickel, Richard, 129 production, 136, 178; generational Scholastic magazine, 199 succession theme, 178; naturalism, Schramm, Wilbur, 329-33, 335-36, 178 338-39, 342, 359, 420 0.36 The Social Conduct and Attitudes of Movie

Schudson, Michael, 34 Fans (Shuttleworth and May), 67Science-Factual series, 327 68, 393 0.40 scientific approach to child-rearing, social construction of the child, 4-5, | 104-9, 152-59, 252, 375, 416 n.39; 26-27, 387 n.4; benefits of movies, behaviorism, 17, 103, 109, 186-87, 43-45; Disney’s example, 26, 30; 256-57; middle class focus, 362; re- premature sophistication concerns, jection, 22, 250, 254-57, 261-62, 266, 44-45 269-70, 274-77, 416 n.39. See also social construction of Walt Disney, 25child-rearing, before World War II; 32; awards and testimonials, 35-37,

management and efficiency 36f; connections to constructions of

Scott, Joan, 14-15 the child, 26. See also Disney, Walter Seal Island, 197, 246, 285, 315 Elias Secrets of Life, 286, 309, 314 social engineering, 172-75, 185-94;

Seiter, Ellen, 72, 359 animation metaphor, 179-80; childSelf Reliance (Fisher), 110 rearing, 177-80; cultural autonomy,

The Seri Indians, 327 224-25, 235, 409 nn. 41-42; vs. insettlement houses. See Progressive structive social science, 218-19;

reform movement Mead’s American Character, 212-13; Seventeen magazine's Life with Teena, productive consumption, 184-85,

199 193-94, 401 n.3; Whyte’s systems of

sexuality: child development, 20, 265- control, 233 70, 290-94; Donald Duck, 20, 365; Social Ethic, 228-35, 271 Freudian theory, 265, 268-69, 288- social science: Disney’s use of, 76; em-

92, 416 n.38 piricism, 218; establishment of

Shayon, Robert, 337, 340-41 norms, 122-24; impact of commuShort, William, 72, 392 n.32, 393 n.36, nications research, 331-36; man-

394 nN. 41, 394 n.45 agement and efficiency, 105-9, 398 Shuttleworth, Frank, 67-68 n.33; media effects research, 329-44, Silly Symphonies, 135-36, 170-71; annual 382, 420 nn.35-36; opinion research,

production, 27, 135; rags-to-riches 198-201; Payne Fund research, 63-

themes, 74-75 73, 393 N.36, 394 N.42; studies of Sklar, Robert, 45 communities, 139-40; study of chilSmall-Town Stuff (Blumenthal), 140 dren, 95-96; Whyte’s Social Ethic,

Smith, Julia Holmes, 98 228-35. See also research INDEX * 469

N.5 337

Song of the South, 182, 2.48, 350, 365, 423 Television and Our Children (Shayon),

sound, 57 Television in the Lives of Our Children Soviet Union, 218, 257-60, 413 n.10 (Schramm, Lyle, and Parker), 329Spock, Benjamin, 14, 102, 251, 253, 414 33 | _ n.23; child-centered child-rearing, Thematic Apperception Test (TAT), 200 22, 123, 188, 260-64, 272-79, 413-14 ‘A Theory of Mass Culture” (Mac-

| nn.17-20; children’s sexuality, 20; on Donald), 207-8, 236, 243 developmental milestones, 413 n.17; “This is You,” 347-48, 349f , on effects of television, 420-21n.44, Thom, Douglas, 105-7, 122-24, 129, 398

421 n.48; on fathers, 290-91; Parents’ n.34 Magazine articles, 273-84, 412 n.4, Thomas, Paul, 377-78, 383, 385

413 1.17 Thorndike, Edward, 99

Steamboat Willie, 28, 52, 166 The Three Caballeros, 182, 248

Stearns, Peter, 12 The Three Little Pigs, 74, 76, 135, 170-71

Stelzle, Charles, 86-87, 105 Tide magazine, 337-38

, Stoddard, George, 70 Tomorrow (Wylie), 302

Stromboli, 77 | Tomorrowland, 300, 305, 354 suburban life, 21, 362-63, 378-79; con- Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy

formity, 302-3; frontier images, (Friedrich and Brzezinski), 207 294-303, 316, 375; group participa- totalitarianism. See Cold War; Soviet

tion, 230-33, 41I n.52; naturalism, Union 227, 378-79; parallels with lemming § Touchstone, 387 n.2 society, 201-5. See also Middletown _ Toy Guidance Council, 280

Survival in Nature, 327 | tradition-directed personalities, 217, 241

, Treasure Island, 304

Tate, Lionel, 2 True Life Adventures, 19-21, 195-97, Taussig, Michael, 363, 376, 379 225-27, 235-46, 305-11, 378-79; adTaylor, F. W., 105-9, 155, 399 n.4I | vertising/public relations, 418 n.13;

Technicolor, 135 - animation mixed with live action,

television, 21, 206, 315-16, 329-36, 407 182, 248, 295; anthropomorphism, n.13; adventure programs, 344; 237, 239, 246, 306-8, 311, 411 n.56; advertising, 331-38; babysitter func- cold-war images, 226-27; comtion, 337-40, 342-43; behavioral munity presence, 312-16; on Dischanges in children, 338-42, 420-21 neyland, 322; dramatic narratives, — n.44, 421 nn.47—48; demographics, 2.40; filming methods, 308-10; fron-

) 329; effects research, 329-44, 355, tier images, 294-99; gendered , | 420 nn.35-36; National Association roles, 285-87, 415-16 n.37; lemming code, 320; parents’ monitoring role, society, 203-5; on Mickey Mouse 336-44; westerns, 344. See also Dis- Club, 346-47; narrative voice, 238neyland (television program); Mickey 39, 295; the natural world, 252; ParMouse Club (television program) ents’ Magazine award, 352; postwar

470 * INDEX |

era diversification, 411-12 n.1; struc- documentary film program, 244; ture, 201-3; teachers’ guides, 325f, educational programming, 21, 303, 327-28, 346-47; temporal aspects, 313, 318f, 324-28, 325f, 346-47, 352-

237, 240, 245 53, 419 nn.27-28, 419 n.30; Fordist

| Turner, Frederick Jackson, 296 production process, 27-28, 116-20, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, 320 135-36, 299, 304-5, 365; generational succession theme, 178; government

United Church Brotherhood, 58 connections, 248-49; industrial exUniversity of Chicago Press, 81 pertise, 18-21, 27-28, 115-20, 133-34, U.S. government: Children’s Bureau, 136, 161-62, 175-78, 304-5, 366, 399 94-95, 107, I2I-22, 192-93, 393 n.37, nn. 41-43; labor atmosphere, 29, 118399 N.40, 415 0.35; connections with 20, 400 n.44; media effects, 382-85; Walt Disney Productions, 248-49; moral responsibility, 74-80; nature

filmmaking, 47-48 and culture link, 299, 301-3, 307-8,

, 324, 328-29, 344-56, 419 n.32; other

Valentino, Rudolph, 46, 391 n.19 labels, 387 n.2; Parents’ Magazine

Van Doren, Mark, 172 medal of honor, 113; Payne Fund The Vanishing Prdirie, 227, 294-99 research, 73-76; postwar era diver-

vaudeville, 46 | sification, 19-21, 247-50, 303, 313, violence, 1-3, 339-40, 358-60, 382-83 AII-I2 N.1, 419 N.23; prescreening

of movies, 171-72, 239, 411 0.55, 412

Wallace, Irving, 31 n.2; productive consumption, 184Waller, Gregory, 30 85; promotional products, 20, 34-36, Walt Disney Christmas Show, 317 79-80, II12—13, II5-16, 165-66, 306, “Walt Disney Pays Tribute to the Ani- 310, 317-24, 323f, 348-53, 351f, 422

mal Actor Kingdom,” 308 n.56; public feedback, 181-82; reWalt Disney Presents, 317, 353 VieWS, 170-72, 305, 310-12, 313-16, Walt Disney Productions, 2, 304-5, 320-21, 32.4, 418 nn.11-13; science _ 312-16, 366-67; Academy Awards, and nature shows, 303-11; scientific 196-97, 202; advertising /public re- procedures, 127-29; social engineerlations, 17, 128-29, 169-72, I81-82, ing, 177-85; study of human and 305-16, 418 nn.11-13; annual pro- animal behavior, 76, 109, 127-29, duction, 27, 115-16, 135-36; archives, 182-83, 400 n.49; teachers’ guides, 417 n.6; awards, 35-37, 36f, 113, 196- (324-28, 325f, 346-47, 352-53, 419 97, 202, 352, 419-20 n.33, 422 n.58; n.30, 419 nn.27-28; technology de-

brand recognition, 74-76; censor- velopment, 28-29, 119, 135, 182, ship, 76; children’s matinee market, 190; World War II production, 168-69; child-safe consumption, 117, 183, 2.48, 303, 405 n.50. See also 112-15, 118, 165-69; commodifi- animation; Disney, Walter Elias; cation of “Uncle Walt,” 15-16, 21, Mickey Mouse; Silly Symphonies; 25-32, 79-80, 365-68; copyright television; True Life Adventures and trademark protection, 182; Wanger, Walter, 117

: INDEX * 471

Warner, W. Lloyd, 229 nn.50-51; Social Ethic, 228-35, 271;

Warner brothers, 46 systems of control, 233, 242 “The Waste of Private Housekeeping” Why We Fight films, 333

(Gilman), 105 | Williams, Raymond, 16

Water Birds, 197, 347 Wilson, Sloan, 216, 302 Watson, John B., 14, 109, 129, 186-89, Windy Dink and You, 344

256; child-rearing literature, 107; Wishy, Bernard, 10-11

child research facility, 103; develop- Wissler, Clark, 139 | | mental philosophy, 106; popular Wolfenstein, Martha, 199 rejection of behaviorism, 274-77 The Wonderful World of Disney (television

Watts, Steven, 12-13 program), 418 n.22

, Weber, Max, 229 | World War II: child-centered approach, Wechsler psychogalvanograph, 66, 67f © 4o1 n.1; child-rearing perspectives,

Wednesday’s Child, 59 190-93; Mickey Mouse symbol, “What Effect Does tv Advertising Have 247-48; Walt Disney Productions

on Children” (Brumbaugh), 337 output, 117, 183, 405 n.50

(Fisher), 106 ,

What Grandmother Did Not Know Wylie, Philip, 302.

“What I Know About Girls” (Disney), Yale Press historical films, 163

, 286-89 Yale Psycho-Clinic, 103-4, 106 , “What I’ve Learned from the Animals” Yankee City (Warner and Lunt), 140, 210

(Disney), 286 , Yen Sid, 175-78

“What I Want to Be,” 348 Yerkes, Robert M., 182 “When Children Have Bad Dreams,” Youcha, Geraldine, 95

289-90 Young Men’s Christian Association, 57 “Whistle While You Work,” 178 Your Child Is Normal (Adams), 186-87 White House Conference on Child Your Child’s Development and Guidance

Health and Protection, 132 Told in Pictures (Meek), 125f White House Conference on Children Youth and the Future, 192-93

n.12 395 n.4 | and Youth, 302, 334 Youth and the Race (Swift), 106

White Wilderness, 201-5, 297-98, 407 Youth in the Depression (Davis), 81, 83, 86,

“Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf,” You, Your Children, and War (Baruch), 190 170-71

Whyte, William, 8, 22, 297; confor- Zelizer, Viviana, II, 94-95, 374 mity, 211-12, 227-35, 410n.46, 410-11 Zukor, Adolph, 45, 53

472 * INDEX ,

BLANK PAGE

NICHOLAS SAMMOND IS ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF

CINEMA STUDIES AT THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO. , HE 1S THE EDITOR OF STEEL CHAIR TO THE HEAD:

THE PLEASURE AND PAIN OF PROFESSIONAL WRESTLING. |

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS . , CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

SAMMOND, NICHOLAS. |

P. CM. | BABES IN TOMORROWLAND: WALT DISNEY AND THE |

MAKING OF THE AMERICAN CHILD, 1930-1960 / NICHOLAS SAMMOND.

INCLUDES BIBLIOGRAPHICAL REFERENCES AND

INDEX.

ISBN 0-8223-3451-8 (CLOTH : ALK. PAPER) )

ISBN 0-8223-3463-1 (PBK. : ALK. PAPER) , . |. CHILDREN—UNITED STATES — HISTORY — 20TH

CENTURY. 2. DISNEY, WALT, 1901-1966. 3. CHILDREN

IN MOTION PICTURES. I. TITLE. | HQ792.U5S26 2005

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